by Lynne Olson
In minutes the sky over the capital was suffused with a fiery red glow; black smoke billowed up into a vast cloud that blanketed much of the horizon. When shrapnel from antiaircraft guns rained down around the American reporters, they dived into a nearby ditch, where, stunned, they watched the seemingly endless procession of enemy aircraft flying north. “London is burning. London is burning,” Robertson kept repeating. Returning to the city, they found flames sweeping through the East End, consuming dockyards, oil tanks, factories, overcrowded tenements, and everything else in their path. Hundreds of people had been killed, thousands injured or driven from their homes. Under a blood-red moon, women pushed prams piled high with their salvaged belongings.
That horrific evening marked the beginning of the Blitz: from September 7 on, London would endure fifty-seven straight nights of relentless bombing. Until then, no other city in history had ever been subjected to such an onslaught. Warsaw and Rotterdam had been heavily bombed by the Germans early in the war, but not for the length of time of the assault on London.
Although the working-class East End suffered frequent batterings that autumn and winter, no London neighborhood was immune. The fashionable shopping areas of Bond Street and Regent Street were blasted to pieces, the pavements covered with so much shattered glass from department store windows that the scene looked like the aftermath of an unseasonable snowstorm. On Oxford Street, the John Lewis department store was a burned-out ruin. Ten Downing Street suffered bomb damage, as did the Colonial Office, Treasury, and Horse Guards building. Hardly a pane of glass was left in the War Office after one raid, and Buckingham Palace was hit several times. As the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie wrote in his diary, every resident of London, regardless of where he or she lived, was “as continually alive to danger as animals in the jungle.”
That included the American war correspondents, who no longer were impartial observers with the ability to witness frontline action and then withdraw to the safety of the rear to file their stories. Coming from a country that prided itself on being immune to attack by a foreign power, some had trouble accepting the fact that safety wasn’t an option anymore. “You can’t do this to me. I’m an American,” Eric Sevareid remembered thinking on the first night of the Blitz. “Luckily,” he added, “that moment was brief.”
The reporters’ personal experience in the Blitz became a key element in their coverage. Their empathy with Londoners was strengthened by the fact that they, too, were London residents under fire. They felt the same paralyzing fear when listening to the high-pitched whistle of a falling bomb, the same overwhelming sense of relief when it exploded some distance away. “Like everyone else, I too got to understand the sensation of the frailty of human existence,” Ben Robertson wrote. “You were never free from the feeling that death was close—there was always the tension.”
Yet, for a number of the American reporters, life was not nearly as dangerous as it was for many citizens of the capital. With their lavish expense accounts, they could afford to live in the city’s modern luxury hotels and apartment buildings, whose steel frames were thought to offer considerably more protection than most of London’s structures. Ben Robertson stayed at Claridge’s, Vincent Sheean at the Dorchester. Quentin Reynolds had a flat at Lansdowne House in Berkeley Square, where he kept three goldfish in the bidet and shared a valet with another American reporter.
In November 1940, correspondents for the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune moved into the Savoy, where they set up offices. Other reporters followed. The Savoy not only boasted one of the deepest, most luxurious shelters in town but also one of the best restaurants, located in the underground River Room, whose heavy curtains and dance floor orchestra helped shut out the crash of gun barrages outside. Just by walking through the Savoy’s revolving door, one was transported from the havoc of war to “the same luxury and brightness and crowds of people that you can find in any good New York hotel,” wrote the columnist Ernie Pyle. “The reception clerks were all in tuxedos. The bellboys were in gray uniforms. The elevator operators wore wing collars.” Said one wartime resident: “Once inside the Savoy, you’d hardly know there was a war within a thousand miles.” The hotel’s American Bar became the favored hangout for U.S. journalists— so much so that Douglas Williams, a Ministry of Information official, moved his nightly briefings for the Americans to the bar, where he held forth, cocktail in hand.
ALTHOUGH ED MURROW came to the Savoy for an occasional drink or dinner, he did not follow his colleagues’ example and take up residence there. He and Janet stayed in their apartment block on Hallam Street, which was now deserted except for them and another tenant. Their neighborhood of elegant Regency townhouses and small apartment buildings near Broadcasting House, a prime German bombing target, had become a perilous place in which to live. Although the Murrows’ building was never hit, many of the houses and shops around them were demolished. The CBS office, also near the BBC, was bombed in the early days of the Blitz; once relocated, it was hit twice more.
Having lived in London longer than most of his American counterparts, Murrow knew the city better and arguably loved it more. As the bombs rained down, he much preferred roaming its neighborhoods to sitting in hotel bars or interviewing MPs and Whitehall officials. He did cover the government’s activities, of course, but more often he yielded to his compulsion to be out on the street, often during the heaviest raids, to find out how the people of London were faring. His BBC friends called him their “messenger from hell,” who, disheveled, dusty, and “shaken to the core,” would return to Broadcasting House every night to tell them what he had seen outside and then do the same for his listeners at home.
“Words are such puny things,” he said once. “There are no words to describe the things that are happening.” In his broadcasts, though, he always managed to find them. He was a virtuoso of words, a master at painting verbal portraits of a drama that still seemed distant and incomprehensible to many Americans. Only by putting his listeners in other people’s minds and hearts, he believed, would the war begin to have real meaning for them. “He made everything concrete and specific,” Eric Sevareid recalled. “He got down to the bare bones of things.” Through the “spoken word,” added the BBC’s Godfrey Talbot, Murrow was able to “give you a picture of what things felt like, smelt like, burned like…. So you, the listener, felt yourself standing beside him on the streets of London.”
In one broadcast, he described rescue workers tunneling through the wreckage of a bombed-out house, gently lifting out limp figures “looking like broken, castaway, dust-covered dolls.” After visiting a makeshift shelter in one of London’s Underground stations, he talked of the “cold, choking fog” that had seeped into the shelter and noted how, after his visit, he climbed the stairs “into the damp darkness of the night, pursued by the sound of coughing.” In yet another report, he gave his listeners a look at a London antiaircraft battery in action: “They’re working in their shirtsleeves, laughing and cursing as they shove the shells into their guns. The spotters and detectors swing slowly around in their reclining carriage. The lens of the night glasses look like the eyes of an overgrown owl in the orange-blue light that belches from the muzzle of the gun.”
The Londoners he mentioned in his broadcasts were those for whom Murrow had the greatest admiration. For all the satisfaction he took in associating with Britain’s rich and powerful, he felt a much stronger kinship with the middle-and working-class people who bore the brunt of the Blitz—”the little people who live in those little houses, who have no uniforms, who get no decorations for bravery” but who were “exceedingly brave, tough, and prudent.” In the Battle of London, the frontline troops were not the toffs of the West End, but the firemen, wardens, doctors, nurses, clergymen, telephone repairmen, and other workers who nightly risked their lives to aid the wounded, retrieve the dead, and bring their battered city back to life. In his broadcasts, Murrow repeatedly focused on these “unsung heroes” who went about their work with
bombs falling around them—”those black-faced men with bloodshot eyes fighting fires, the girls who cradle the steering wheel of a heavy ambulance in their arms, the policeman who stands guard over that unexploded bomb.”
Like other American reporters, Murrow was struck by the calmness, fortitude, and ironic humor exhibited by Londoners during these days and nights of terror. He enjoyed repeating to his friends the question that one city resident put to him at the height of the Luftwaffe assault: “Do you think we’re really brave—or just lacking in imagination?” As Eric Sevareid observed, “This is what he loved about the British. They were steady. They didn’t panic, didn’t get emotional.”
In mid-October, a bomb crashed into the BBC, destroying the music library and several studios and killing seven staffers, several of them friends of Murrow’s. The explosion occurred while the announcer Bruce Belfrage was reading the nine o’clock news. Listeners heard a thud, a short pause, and a whispered “Are you all right?” Then, after blowing plaster dust off his script, Belfrage continued with the news. Murrow, who was at the BBC at the time of the blast, told his listeners: “I’ve seen some horrible sights in this city … but not once have I heard man, woman, or child suggest that Britain should throw in her hand.”
Indeed, in the midst of the devastation, most Londoners demonstrated a dogged determination to live as normal a life as possible: it was their way of thumbing their nose at Hitler. Each morning, millions of people left their shelters or basements and, despite the constant disruption of the train and Underground systems, went to work as usual, many hitchhiking or walking ten or more miles a day. Their commutes, which frequently involved long detours around collapsed buildings, impassable streets, and unexploded bombs, could take hours. Of the staff at Claridge’s, Ben Robertson noted after a particularly violent raid: “Everyone was red-eyed and tired, but they were all there.” The head waiter’s house had been demolished during the night, but he had shown up, as had the woman who cleaned Robertson’s room. “She was buried three hours in the basement of her house,” another maid told Robertson. “Three hours! And she got to work this morning as usual.”
FOR ALL THE FEAR, pain, and destruction of the Blitz, there was an excitement, a sense of energy about living in London during that period that, in the view of many who were there, was never to be equaled. 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,” Quentin Reynolds wrote in his diary. Ben Robertson later observed: “The city in this crisis had rediscovered itself; it was living as it never had lived…. You came out on the street at daybreak now with the feeling that you personally had been helping to save the world.”
American correspondents who left London for brief respites in the United States or other neutral countries initially looked forward to getting away from the relentless dread and terror. But, having arrived in their boltholes, many felt a sense of alienation from the people living there, who had no idea of what it was like to live on a battlefield, and they yearned to be back in London. The experience of Robertson, who spent a few days in neutral Ireland, was typical: “It was like reaching heaven to arrive in Dublin from the battleground of London. All the burden of war was lifted from you, and there were lights on and a feeling of airiness, and suddenly you were free.” At the same time, he noted, it was “a profoundly disturbing” experience. “All the good life made you very restless. You found when you were away from London … you could not keep from worrying. You worried about London and about everyone you knew in London.”
For the reporters who left the British capital for good, there was often a deep sense of loss. In mid-October, Eric Sevareid, ill and exhausted, was transferred to Washington by CBS. Four months earlier, after the fall of France, the twenty-seven-year-old Minnesota native had arrived in England with a chip on his shoulder. Like many Americans, he had a deep streak of Anglophobia, disliking, among other things, the way that certain Britons—“stiff dowagers, professional army officers, high-ranking civil servants” among them—made him feel uncomfortable and inadequate by what he perceived as their haughty, patronizing manner. Having seen the collapse of the vaunted French army, he also doubted the ability of the smug, insular British, as he viewed them, to stand up to Hitler.
By October, his doubts and antagonisms had vanished. Once an “American stranger” in London, he now felt himself to be part of that embattled community. Britain and its capital, he wrote years later, “showed the world a face it had not seen before in this war. During those bright days and livid nights of 1940, the spirit of the British called up from despair the spirit of other men…. It was this spirit and example which overbore the defeatists in the United States…. Americans thought they were saving Britain—and they were. But the spirit and example of Britain also were saving America.”
When Sevareid returned home, he emphasized to anyone who would listen the importance of helping the British. A number of the American correspondents who remained in London had their own roles to play in the pro-British propaganda effort. Well aware of the influence of Murrow and the others with the U.S. public, officials in Whitehall sought to capitalize on the reporters’ sympathy and identification with Britain and its people. “They are extremely friendly to us, and they can be relied upon to see that our side of the case is put forward, always providing that it is given accurately and quickly to them,” wrote Ronald Tree, who joined the Ministry of Information in May 1940.
Some American journalists, including Murrow himself, agreed to narrate British news documentaries aimed at their countrymen, showing Britons’ resolve in standing up to the German onslaught. The most famous of the films was London Can Take It!, a ten-minute short about Londoners’ response to the Blitz, narrated by Quentin Reynolds. The Ministry of Information had originally suggested that Mary Welsh, a reporter for Time and Life in London (and the future wife of Ernest Hemingway), do the commentary, but the film’s director, Harry Watt, hated the idea of a female narrator and chose Reynolds instead.
The filmmakers, however, had a difficult time with the Collier’s star. Having previously proven his courage in war zones all over the world, he refused to leave the underground American Bar at the Savoy to cover the nightly German raids, admitting later how much he “hated and dreaded” the attacks. Reynolds also had no broadcasting experience, and he initially “bellowed out” the commentary, which he had written, “like a barker in a fairground.” Watt and his team finally recorded Reynolds’s voice-over in the Savoy bar, “sticking the microphone nearly down his throat” to produce a whispered growl that captured the fancy of America. “I am a neutral reporter,” his narration began. “I have watched the people of London live and die … I can assure you there is no panic, no fear, no despair in London town.”
Warner Brothers, which distributed London Can Take It! in the United States, rushed out six hundred prints in early November 1940; the film was featured by eight theaters in downtown New York City alone. An enormous success, it eventually was shown at more than twelve thousand theaters throughout the country. Only Reynolds’s name appeared in the film’s credits, leading his fellow Americans to believe that it was the unbiased personal report of a U.S. reporter—”a belief that Quent did not battle to belie,” Watt recalled.
Reynolds, who had gone to the United States to promote the short, returned to London “an international figure,” Watt added, “and amused us by growling sotto voce all the time.” But what really tickled the British film team and Reynolds’s American compatriots in London was a poster for the film that he brought back, depicting him wearing a tin hat, gazing defiantly at the sky, and warding off a five-hundred-pound bomb with his right arm. “It must have been a lot tougher in the Savoy than we thought,” Watt observed.
While Reynolds was working on London Can Take It!, Murrow wrote and recorded the commentary for This Is England, a full-length feature that also documented British resistance to the Blitz but in
much greater detail than the Reynolds short. Churchill reportedly cried when he saw the Murrow film, and President Roosevelt screened it at the White House. It, too, was a major hit.
IN THEIR ADVOCACY of the British cause, there was no question that Murrow and the other American reporters in London were blurring the line between journalism and propaganda. At the very least, they were violating journalistic standards of objectivity—reporting news without personal prejudice, opinion, or point of view. Objectivity is a criterion that has been debated for as long as journalism has existed; in the view of many if not most journalists, it’s an impossible standard to meet, since reporters are not robots, with blank slates for minds.
But objectivity and neutrality had been mantras for CBS News from the beginning of the war, ever since the Roosevelt administration, fearing that the broadcast networks would rouse war fever in their audiences, started dropping hints about putting them under federal control. Noting that radio was a “rookie” at handling war stories, White House press secretary Stephen Early warned the networks to behave like “a good child.”
At the outset of the conflict, William Paley, the chairman of CBS, decreed that analysis would be allowed on his network, but not opinion. Murrow made mincemeat of that policy from the start. The network, although reproving him occasionally, did little to stop him. “He made no pretense about being neutral or objective,” Eric Sevareid observed. “As a reporter, his heart and soul was ‘the cause.’ … He was convinced we’d have to be in the war.” Murrow wrote to his brother in early 1941: “I have no desire to use the studio as a privileged pulpit, but I am convinced that some very plain talking is required, even if it be at the price of being labeled a ‘warmonger.’ … I am convinced that the hour is much later than most people at home appreciate.”