Citizens of London

by Lynne Olson

  FOR THE AMERICANS in London, the spring and summer of 1941 was an agonizing, frustrating period. Washington, with its unwillingness to come to grips with the possible defeat of Britain, seemed like another planet to them. “There is still too much wishful thinking, too much idiotic optimism, too much being left to chance, too much of the democratic ‘too little and too late,’ ” fumed Raymond Lee, one of the most stalwart proponents of the British cause in the American embassy. “It is only by being here that one realizes the actuality and pressure of the emergency.”

  Averell Harriman was even more irate. “It is impossible for me to understand the ostrich-like attitude of America,” he wrote to a friend. “Either we have an interest in the outcome of this war or we have not…. If we have, why do we not realize that every day we delay direct participation … we are taking an extreme risk that either the war will be lost or the difficulty of winning will be multiplied for each week we delay?” To his wife, Harriman disparaged Roosevelt’s expansion of American patrols in the Atlantic, which he described as “using warships as spies instead of to shoot. Hasn’t the country any pride? Are we to continue to hide behind the skirts of these poor British women who are holding up the civil defense here? … Don’t think I am depressed. I am only angry.”

  Again and again, he and Winant pressed the president and his men for more vigorous action and more direct involvement. “England’s strength is bleeding,” Harriman cabled Roosevelt in April. “In our own interest, I trust that our Navy can be directly employed before our partner is too weak.” As Lend-Lease representative, he did what he could to speed up the flow of aid to Britain, such as persuading American shippers to stow their cargoes in a way that allowed British longshoremen to unload them faster. Yet he also suggested initiatives, like the repair of British vessels in American shipyards, that brought America one step, albeit a small one, closer to belligerency.

  At Downing Street and in government offices in Whitehall, there was no doubt that Harriman and Winant wanted their country in the war. Churchill, who was in contact with both Americans virtually every day, told his cabinet that he had been “greatly encouraged” by their attitude. “These two gentlemen,” he said, “[are] apparently longing for Germany to commit some overt act that would relieve the president of his … declaration regarding keeping out of the war.”

  For both, it was a difficult balancing act. They were, in effect, serving two governments: they were their country’s top representatives in Britain while acting as Churchill’s agents for conveying Britain’s needs to the United States. But, as they made clear to British officials, their primary duty was to their own chief executive and country. They were, said John Colville, “two men who not only represented their country with exemplary skill but contrived to become close personal friends of Churchill, his family and his entourage without for one moment losing their independence of thought and action.”

  Both Americans did their best to aid Churchill in selling his views to the president and others in the administration. With their intimate knowledge of the personalities and politics of Washington, they helped the prime minister and his government interpret responses from Roosevelt and his men and took part in the crafting of Churchill’s proposals and other messages to the White House. In addition, they pushed the prime minister to tone down his increasingly insistent, splenetic cables to FDR. Once, when Harriman made such a suggestion, Churchill irritatedly rejected it out of hand. Harriman, however, stood firm, and Churchill grudgingly said he’d think about it. The next morning, he handed Harriman a new draft of the cable that incorporated the recommendation.

  When Churchill began withholding figures showing the full extent of Britain’s shipping losses in the spring, Harriman and Winant urged him to rethink his decision, declaring that he should release more information rather than less. To convince the American public and government of the need for more active involvement, they said, it was essential that the full gravity of the crisis facing Britain be revealed, both on the shipping and military fronts. “What America requires is not propaganda but the facts,” Winant declared in a speech. This was one issue, however, on which Churchill would not yield.

  At the same time, in an effort to help smooth things over for Churchill on the political front, Winant tried to explain the prime minister to his critics, both at home and abroad. When some disgruntled MPs put pressure on the British leader to give up his position as defense minister (an unprecedented assumption of power by a prime minister), Winant told them that, in taking on both jobs, Churchill was able to deal on a more equal basis with Roosevelt regarding war matters than if his military responsibility was assigned to someone else. And when newly arrived American correspondents complained about Churchill’s refusal to hold press conferences like the president, Winant explained that, in a parliamentary system, the prime minister kept the people informed through his weekly question sessions in the House of Commons. He added that MPs would deeply resent Churchill’s bypassing them to report through the press to the public.

  ON MAY 10, THE day that Roosevelt issued his nonresponse to Churchill’s plea for U.S. belligerency, German bombers returned to London. As devastating as the previous raids had been, none came close to the savagery and destructiveness of this new firestorm. By the next morning, more than two thousand fires were raging out of control across the city, from Hammersmith in the west to Romford in the east, some twenty miles away.

  The damage to London’s landmarks was catastrophic. Queen’s Hall, the city’s premier concert venue, lay in ruins, while more than a quarter of a million books were incinerated and a number of galleries destroyed at the British Museum. Bombs smashed into St. James’s Palace, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and Parliament. The medieval Westminster Hall, though badly damaged, was saved, but not so the House of Commons chamber, the scene of some of the most dramatic events in modern British history. Completely gutted by fire, the little hall, with its vaulted, timbered ceiling, was nothing but a mound of debris, gaping open to the sky.

  Every major railroad station but one was put out of action for weeks, as were many Underground stations and lines. A third of the streets in greater London were impassable, and almost a million people were without gas, water, and electricity.

  The death toll was even more calamitous: never in London’s history had so many of its residents—1,436—died in a single night. Among the dead were Alan Wells, the foreign editor of the BBC’s Home Service, and his wife, Claire, who were neighbors and close friends of Ed and Janet Murrow. The Wellses, both volunteer fire wardens, had been trying to extinguish an incendiary bomb near their home when a high-explosive bomb detonated nearby.

  Since the Blitz began, some 43,000 British civilians had been killed by bombs, about half of them in London. As of the spring of 1941, far more British women and children had died in the war than had members of the country’s armed forces. More than two million houses were damaged or destroyed; in the central London area, only one house in ten had escaped completely unscathed.

  A few days after the raid, in a small neighborhood church, the Murrows attended the last rites for the Wellses, the latest of several funerals to which they had gone in the last few months. At about the same time, Winston Churchill paid a melancholy visit to the ruins of the House of Commons chamber. More than virtually any other MP, he could lay claim to this place as his. Here, he had come as a new member more than forty years before. Here, in the 1930s, he had warned Parliament and the country of the dangers of appeasement. Here, the climactic debate over Neville Chamberlain’s conduct of the war occurred in May 1940, leading to Churchill’s accession to power. And here, as Britain fought on alone, he delivered his soaring speeches of defiance to the German threat. As the prime minister took a last look around at the wreckage of the chamber, tears streamed down his face.

  ON MAY 15, in a speech to the English-Speaking Union in London, Gil Winant noted that, across the street from Parliament and Westminster Abbey, a statue of his hero, Abraham Lincoln, s
till stood. “As an American,” Winant said, “I am proud that Lincoln was there in all that wreckage as a friend and sentinel … and a reminder that in [his own] great battle for freedom, he waited quietly for support for those things for which he lived and died.”

  That veiled comparison of Lincoln to the British people was followed by a somewhat less subtle declaration by the ambassador that he stood firmly with the British—and thought it was time his own country did so, too. “We have all slept while wicked, evil men plotted destruction,” he remarked. “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.”

  As both the Times of London and the New York Times pointed out, Winant’s use of “we” in his speech, one of the most powerful he ever delivered, was aimed as much at the United States as at Britain. “We have made our tasks infinitely more difficult because we failed to do yesterday what we are glad to do today,” he declared. “To delay longer will make the war more protracted and increase the sacrifices for victory. Let us stop asking ourselves if it is necessary to do more now. Let us ask ourselves what more we can do today, so we have less to sacrifice tomorrow.”

  * For her immense service to her country’s war effort, Lady Reading became the first woman to be elevated to the House of Lords.

  DURING THE WEEKEND OF THE MASSIVE MAY 10 ATTACK ON LONDON, Winston and Clementine Churchill were staying at Ditchley, Ronald and Nancy Tree’s country estate near Oxford. Seven months earlier, the Trees had proposed that, whenever there was a full moon on weekends, Churchill come to Ditchley instead of Chequers, since the prime minister’s official country residence—a chilly, drafty Elizabethan mansion—was considered a prime target in the event of an enemy raid. The prime minister, who loved the opulence of Ditchley, took full advantage of the offer, bringing his retinue to the Tree estate thirteen times over the next two years.

  Members of Churchill’s entourage spent the weekend enjoying the Trees’ lavish hospitality. Among them was Averell Harriman, who was approached by Clementine Churchill with an unsettling favor to ask. The Churchills’ eighteen-year-old daughter, Mary, had recently shocked her parents with the news of her engagement to the twenty-eight-year-old son and heir of the Earl of Bessborough, whom she had met just a short time before. Clementine had nothing against the young man, she told Harriman, but she was convinced that Mary was not in love with him, that she was too young to know what she was doing and had “simply been swept off her feet with excitement.”

  Mary had refused her mother’s pleas to reconsider the engagement. When Clementine asked Winston to talk to their daughter, he had agreed, but, preoccupied as he was with running the war, he never found the time. In desperation, Clementine turned to Harriman. He had two daughters, she said. He knew what young women were like. Would he please try to reason with Mary?

  It was, on several levels, an extraordinary request. Above all, it revealed how, in a few short weeks, Harriman, along with Winant, had become not only a key figure in the prime minister’s government circle but a de facto member of the Churchill family as well. Since their arrival in Britain, one or both of the Americans had spent every weekend with the prime minister and his family at Chequers or Ditchley.

  To Clementine’s dismay, Churchill had resisted her view that weekends in the country should be quiet respites from the wartime madness of London. He had never seen the virtue of separating work from family life and, in the interwar years, had entertained a steady stream of political and military visitors during weekends at Chartwell, the Churchills’ country house in Kent. During the war, his weekend retreats overflowed with generals, admirals, air marshals, cabinet ministers, foreign government leaders, and a sprinkling of Churchill family members. Sometimes there would be as many as three shifts of guests: some summoned just for luncheon, others for dinner, still others spending the entire weekend.

  With Churchill in residence, life at Chequers and Ditchley always seemed poised on the edge of chaos. According to his bodyguard, life with the prime minister “had less schedule than a forest fire and less peace than a hurricane.” Secretaries scurried around; telephones shrilled; government cars, challenged by military sentries, came and went; dispatch riders bustled in and out with official pouches. When not involved in top secret conferences, guests played tennis or croquet, or as Sir Charles Portal, chief of the air staff, did, relaxed by chopping weeds in Ditchley’s gardens. At the center of the action was the cigar-puffing prime minister, who, when he was not dominating the meetings, was holding court during lunch and dinner. Churchill “loved an audience at meals,” his biographer Roy Jenkins wrote. “He was not … good at bilateral conversation, but with a table he could often be brilliant. And his brilliance not only amused and inspired his guests … but also provided an essential boost to his own zest and morale.”

  Harriman and Winant, while part of the official retinue, were pulled into the life of the Churchills and their children in ways that other visitors were not. Both became close personal friends of Churchill and his family, invited, as John Colville noted, “as much for the pleasure of their company as for the business to be done.”

  Still, the idea of counseling Mary Churchill about her love life must have seemed, at least initially, a somewhat daunting challenge to Harriman. His own two daughters had been raised by their mother, who divorced him when they were young; he had spent little time with them while they were growing up. Most of his recent experiences with young women had been as a lover, not as an avuncular adviser. Nonetheless, he gamely agreed to do as Clementine asked. Taking Mary aside for a heart-to-heart chat, he listened quietly as she poured out her side of the story and then talked to her about the uncertainties of war and the perils of making a hasty decision about such a vital, life-changing event as marriage. Mary herself had begun to have misgivings about her engagement, and, after her talk with Harriman, she decided to postpone it; soon afterward, she ended the relationship entirely. “I want to thank you very sincerely for your sympathy and helpfulness,” she wrote Harriman a few days later. “I thought it was most sweet of you—when you are so busy and have so many important claims on your time—to listen so patiently to a recital of my stupidities and heart-aches! You helped me such a lot—and made me take myself less seriously—which was an excellent thing!”

  For Harriman, the fact that Clementine Churchill had singled him out to play father confessor to Mary, no matter how uncomfortable it might have been at the time, was a source of tremendous gratification. His close access to the Churchills had taken away some of the sting of his exclusion from Roosevelt’s New Deal team for so many years. Even though the inner circle to which he had been admitted was that of the British prime minister, not the American president, he was now in the center of the action, just as he had always longed to be.

  In his courtship of Churchill and his family, Harriman employed the same energy and determination he previously had devoted to polo and his other enthusiasms. When he first arrived in London, he presented Clementine with a small bag of tangerines he had picked up in Lisbon. Her expression of delight made him realize how severely the sharp reduction in British food imports had affected even the prime minister’s household. From then on, Harriman, a man usually known for his parsimony, played Santa Claus to the Churchills, plying them with goods that had long since disappeared from British stores—smoked Virginia hams, fresh fruit, handkerchiefs, silk stockings, Havana cigars.

  Besides playing to Churchill’s penchant for rich friends and luxury, Harriman made himself available whenever the prime minister wanted to chat, no matter the hour or place. Often it would be close to midnight when he received a call from 10 Downing Street or from Churchill’s study at Chequers, requesting his presence for a few hands of bezique, a complicated card game that was one of Churchill’s favorite ways of relaxing. As they played until two or three in the morning, Churchill, who was fascinated by the making and unmaking of great fortunes, w
ould regale his wealthy companion with stories of how he himself lost a great deal of money in the 1929 Wall Street crash. Notwithstanding that disaster, he would fantasize to Harriman about “what a wonderful life it would be to be a speculator.” The prime minister would also use Harriman as a sounding board for his thoughts on the latest developments in the war and Anglo-American relations. It was a useful exercise for both men, with Harriman gaining an insight into Churchill’s mind and Churchill getting Harriman’s views on the actions and reactions of Roosevelt and his government.

  Intriguingly, however, Harriman, as single-minded and ambitious as he was, chose to put his privileged position with Churchill and his family in jeopardy almost as soon as he had achieved it, by beginning an affair with Pamela Churchill, the prime minister’s twenty-one-year-old daughter-in-law.

  THE TWO HAD MET over lunch at Chequers in late March 1941, less than two weeks after the Lend-Lease representative had arrived in Britain. Like Harriman, the auburn-haired, blue-eyed Pamela had a fondness for cultivating important men and a fascination for political power. By all accounts, she was immediately captivated by this businessman almost thirty years her senior, who was, she was informed by a friend, “the most important American in London.” At lunch, he had pumped her for information about Churchill and the press baron Lord Beaverbrook, an old friend and adviser of Churchill’s and one of the most powerful and controversial men in Britain. Harriman, she later said, “was a hick from America. He knew nothing” about the current British political scene. But she also recalled how “absolutely marvelous looking” he seemed to her—”very athletic, very tan, very healthy.” Focusing on Harriman with laser-beam intensity, she launched into what friends called her “mating dance,” asking him questions, listening raptly to his comments, and laughing when he attempted a witticism.