Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

by Lynne Olson

  “The production program here is not keyed to realities at all,” the correspondent Vincent Sheean, who had returned to the United States for a brief visit, wrote to Ed Murrow. “All the big talk about ‘defense’ and ‘aid to Britain’ is so much grander than the reality…. The people really don’t understand … anything at all about the seriousness of the moment.”

  With the authority given him by the Lend-Lease Act, Roosevelt ordered that any new war matériel produced in the United States be split fifty-fifty between the British and American armed services. But, as Harriman found while making his rounds of government offices, the U.S. military chiefs of staff were strongly opposed to giving up scarce weapons and other supplies that were needed so badly by their own services. Both the Army chief, General George Marshall, and the Navy chief, Admiral Harold Stark, were convinced of the need to come to the aid of Britain: indeed, for months, they had urged Roosevelt to provide more help than he was willing to give. But, with the condition of their services so dire and the mobilization of American war production so slow and haphazard, they resisted giving anything to Britain that might be important for America’s own defense.

  In early 1941, the United States was a fifth-rate military power, its armed forces ranking seventeenth in size compared to other world forces. Long starved of financial support by Congress and the White House, the Army had little more than 300,000 men (most of them just drafted), compared to Germany’s 4 million and Britain’s 1.6 million. Not a single armored division existed, and draftees were training with broomsticks for rifles and sawhorses for antitank guns. The Army was in such bad shape, according to one military historian, that it would not have been able to “repel raids across the Rio Grande by Mexican bandits.” Although the Navy was in better condition, nearly half its vessels dated back to World War I. The Army Air Corps, meanwhile, could boast only about two thousand combat aircraft.

  After several rounds of meetings with the chiefs and other key military figures, Harriman noted: “We are so short that everything given up by the Army or Navy comes out of our own blood; there is practically nothing surplus and will not be for many months.” The urgent pleas of Harry Hopkins for more help for Britain failed to move the top brass, who thought he had been bewitched by Churchill. “We can’t take seriously requests that come late in the evening over a bottle of port,” snorted one high-ranking officer, in an obvious reference to the late-night tête-à-têtes between the presidential adviser and prime minister.

  The issue of aid was further complicated by the intense Anglophobia of many in the U.S. military, who were convinced that Britain would soon be defeated and that any supplies sent to the British would end up in German hands. In late 1940, Navy Secretary Frank Knox confided to an associate that he “was very much disturbed at finding officers of the United States Navy very defeatist in their point of view.” Knox attributed much of that defeatism to “a speech which had been given them by Ambassador Kennedy since his return home.”

  Within days of his appointment, Harriman realized what a monumental task lay ahead of him. To persuade American military leaders that U.S. munitions and other matériel would be of greater value in British hands than in their own, he would have to convince Churchill and the British to provide compelling evidence that the matériel they wanted was urgently needed and would be put to immediate use. They would have to give up their most sensitive military secrets, including information about their own production and reserves. “Without an understanding and acceptance of [Churchill’s] war strategy,” Harriman wrote in a memo to himself, “our military men will drag their feet.”

  Even more important, the president would have to be persuaded to do far more for Britain than send Lend-Lease supplies, which, in any event, would not begin arriving on British shores for several months. Like Stimson, Stark, and several other top administration officials, Harriman believed that the U.S. Navy must begin protecting British merchant ships in their extraordinarily hazardous journey across the Atlantic. Roosevelt, however, strongly resisted any idea of naval convoying. His administration had sold Lend-Lease to the public and Congress as a way of keeping America out of the war, claiming it was the best hope of stopping Germany without having to send American soldiers to fight. (Florida’s Claude Pepper, one of the few ardent Lend-Lease supporters in the Senate, put the argument a bit more crassly. He declared that Britain, with American aid, would act “as a sort of mercenary, doing America’s fighting for her.”) Roosevelt knew that convoying would heighten the chance of U.S. involvement in a shooting war with German naval and air forces—a risk he was not prepared to take, at least not yet.

  After a final meeting with FDR before departing for London in early March, Harriman began to wonder just how committed the president was to the survival of Britain. The signs, he thought, were not promising. “I left feeling that the President had not faced what I considered to be the realities of the situation, namely, that there was a good chance Germany … could so cripple British shipping as to affect her ability to hold out,” Harriman wrote as he headed for Britain. “He seemed unwilling to lead public opinion or to force the issue but hoped, without the background of reasoning, that our material aid would let the British do the job. I am fearful that if things go against England, more specific aid will come too late.”

  WHEN HARRIMAN ARRIVED in Bristol on March 15, he was met by Churchill’s naval aide, who bundled him into a military plane bound for an airfield near Chequers, some fifty miles northwest of London. A few hours later, America’s Lend-Lease representative was escorted into the prime minister’s bedroom at his country retreat. Although Churchill was in bed with a cold, he immediately got down to business. “He has talked to me personally on all aspects of the war,” Harriman later wrote to his wife, Marie, who had stayed behind in New York. “The Battle of the Atlantic and other parts of the naval shipping struggle are uppermost in his mind as the decisive campaign.” When Harriman told Churchill that he must be given access to all information about Britain’s military resources and needs, no matter how sensitive or top secret, Churchill replied that he would get everything he needed. Echoing his earlier pledge to Winant, he added: “Nothing will be kept from you.”

  For the most part, Churchill lived up to his word to the two Americans, consulting them both on a wide variety of issues. According to Churchill’s secretary John Colville, the American embassy “became little short of an extension to 10 Downing Street. Like others of my colleagues I made frequent journeys to [consult with Winant] at 1 Grosvenor Square.” More than once, Churchill sent Colville to the embassy to have Winant vet his speeches. The prime minister’s secretary recalled one occasion when the ambassador “made four pertinent observations in respect of the effect on U.S. opinion. I was deeply impressed by his unassertive shrewdness and wisdom. I afterwards explained these points to the PM, who accepted them.”

  As frequent as his contacts were with 10 Downing Street, Winant formed even closer ties with the Foreign Office and Anthony Eden, who had replaced Lord Halifax as foreign secretary in early 1941. Indeed, the collaboration between the American ambassador and Eden was so easy and intimate that they did not keep records of their official conversations—an unprecedented practice in international diplomacy, as Eden pointed out. “Quite early in our work together,” he said, “Mr. Winant and I understood that we could not get through our business if each interview between us—and sometimes there were two or more in a day—was to be the subject of a detailed record.” The two usually met in Eden’s cavernous office, where Winant would occasionally make a teasing comment about the portrait of George III hanging prominently above the foreign secretary’s desk before they launched into discussions about everything from supply problems to their countries’ relationship to Vichy France. “We had an odd informal relationship,” Winant later wrote, “based not only on personal friendship but also on our regard for each other’s country and our own.”

  A month after he arrived, Harriman wrote to Roosevelt of the “comple
te confidence and respect that your Ambassador has won from all classes of people in England. He will become, I believe, before he leaves, the most beloved American who has ever been in England. His sympathies are warm, his devotion complete, and his judgment sound.”

  At the American embassy, Winant proved to be as poor an administrator as he had been as head of the Social Security Board—”one of the world’s worst,” according to Theodore Achilles, a political attaché at the embassy. He missed appointments and kept British officials and other dignitaries waiting for hours in his outer office. To the despair of the embassy’s security officers, he often made his rounds with top secret papers stuffed in his pockets; often, his staff would find confidential cables scattered around the tables and floor of his flat. On one occasion, he forgot to tell his housekeeper that Churchill was coming for dinner. When the prime minister arrived, there was nothing in the flat to eat.

  For all his shortcomings, however, Winant was an inspirational leader, just as he had been in Washington. He quickly united a staff that, under his predecessor, had been beset by friction and ill feeling. Under Winant’s guidance, the embassy funneled to Washington a stream of information about British war developments that would later aid the American war effort, from the latest advances in surgical treatment of wounds and burns to news of defects in British tank treads, which helped the U.S. military avoid similar problems in its own tanks.

  In May 1941, Ed Murrow wrote to a friend in New York: “You might like to know that both Winant and Harriman are doing a first-rate job over here, and this American Embassy functions now with more speed and efficiency than I’ve ever seen.” Yet, as important as Churchill considered Winant, he was focusing for the moment on the Lend-Lease representative, whose influence he considered more crucial at that point for the survival of his country. Its situation was becoming graver by the day: shipping losses continued to escalate, and Hitler was clearly preparing an assault on Greece, which historically had been under British protection. In North Africa, Germany seemed poised to come to the aid of Italy, whose ineffective troops had been trounced by the British. In desperate want of ships, planes, weapons, and equipment, Churchill was determined to woo and seduce the American newcomer, just as he had Hopkins and Winant, to get what he needed.

  Within days of Harriman’s arrival, he was given an office at the Admiralty and access to secret cables and documents on production and supplies. He attended the meetings of a War Cabinet subcommittee dealing with the Battle of the Atlantic and had regular discussions with the ministers of shipping, supply, aircraft production, food, and economic warfare. “Each of the ministers … gave me the most sensitive information,” he wrote. “I was somewhat embarrassed that I could not, in response to their questions, tell them exactly what help the United States was prepared to give.” Instead of being viewed as a watchdog over American aid, the British treated him, Harriman said, like a “partner in a vast enterprise.” In a letter to the president of Union Pacific, he declared, “I am accepted practically as a member of the Cabinet,” and to his wife, he proudly noted, “I am with the Prime Minister at least one day a week and usually the weekend as well.” Of Harriman’s first eight weekends in Britain, seven were spent at Chequers, at the Churchills’ invitation. “I was very excited,” he recalled years later, “feeling like a country boy popped right into the center of the war.”

  Flush with a new sense of power, he set about establishing his own empire. His eight-man Lend-Lease mission appropriated twenty-seven rooms at 3 Grosvenor Square, an apartment building next to the embassy; Harriman’s own vast office, which, according to his assistant, had “a somewhat Mussolini-like effect,” was formerly the living room of a luxurious apartment.

  Winant, who had declined to live in the stately official residence of the U.S. ambassador in Kensington, was also a tenant at 3 Grosvenor Square. Anxious to be close to the embassy, he leased a simply furnished three-bedroom flat, where, to the despair of his housekeeper, he subsisted entirely on British civilian rations.

  As one of the richest men in the United States, Harriman had no interest in following Winant’s example in spartan living. He took up residence in a ground-floor suite at the Dorchester Hotel, built ten years earlier and considered the safest building in London during German air raids. It also boasted exceptional soundproofing: its bedroom floors and ceilings were insulated with compressed seaweed and its outside walls with cork. Located in the heart of Mayfair, the Dorchester housed British cabinet ministers, displaced European royalty and government leaders, generals and admirals from all over the world, and affluent Londoners, among them Somerset Maugham, who had abandoned their less structurally substantial houses for the duration. One London socialite called the Dorchester “that gilded refuge of the rich.” Others termed it “a modern wartime Babylon” and “a fortress propped up with moneybags.”

  While most Londoners coped with increasingly severe shortages of food, patrons of the Dorchester restaurant—which, like other eating establishments in London, was not rationed—dined on strawberries, oysters, and smoked salmon, to the accompaniment of show tunes played by the hotel orchestra. “I’ve never seen more lavishness, more money spent, or more food consumed than tonight, and the dance floor was packed,” noted a Tory member of Parliament after dining at the Dorchester one night during the Blitz. “The contrast between the light and gaiety within, and the blackout and the roaring guns outside was terrific.”

  Such high living, in the midst of so much death and destruction, was not to everyone’s taste. “I never felt easy in the dining rooms of the Savoy and Dorchester and Ritz hotels after the Blitz started,” wrote Ben Robertson. “The food and the music got on your conscience when hundreds of thousands were in shelters and when people on every side were dying.” Ed Murrow was similarly dismayed by the dramatic contrasts in the living conditions of Londoners under fire. In one broadcast, he pointed up the differences between the squalid, unsafe public shelter across the street from the Dorchester and the hotel’s own luxurious bolthole in the basement, complete with eiderdown comforters and fluffy white pillows on the cots.

  Harriman, however, expressed no such qualms: he took to the Dorchester—and his new life in London—with great enthusiasm. As the latest American VIP on the scene, he was showered with attention and invitations. “My mail has been staggering,” he wrote his wife. “I never knew I had so many friends and acquaintances in England…. Invitations—weekends to last till doomsday—dinners—lunches—cocktails, etc., etc.” Already heavily engaged in his hobby of people collecting, he told Marie: “I was interrupted by the Prime Minister of Australia who came into my room. He is genial—no airs—I called him ‘Bob’ the second time I met him.”

  WHILE ENJOYING HIS busy social schedule, Harriman had to cram it into the nooks and crannies of his hectic workdays. Like Winant, he was thrust into dealing with thorny problems in Anglo-American relations from the day he arrived. Among them was Britain’s anger over continued American insistence that it sell off major assets in return for U.S. aid. Roosevelt expected Churchill to help him allay isolationist fears that, with the approval of Lend-Lease, Britain was taking advantage of the United States. In early 1941, the president ordered the dispatch of an American destroyer to South Africa to collect British gold worth £50 million being held there and bring it back to America. His administration also coerced the sale of the American Viscose Corporation, a British-owned textile company, to a group of American bankers, who promptly resold it for a much higher price.

  The American actions “wear the aspect of a sheriff collecting the last assets of a helpless debtor,” a furious Churchill wrote in a cable to Roosevelt that was never sent. “You will not, I am sure, mind my saying that if you are not able to stand by us in all measures apart from war, we cannot guarantee to beat the Nazi tyranny and gain you the time you require for your rearmament.” To one of his cabinet ministers, the prime minister raged: “As far as I can make out, we are not only to be skinned but flayed to th
e bone.” Although Harriman did his best to allay British fury over America’s hardheaded business tactics, the feeling of resentment lingered throughout the war. “How the English hate being rescued by the Americans,” Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie wrote in his diary. “They know they must swallow it, but, God, how it sticks in their throats.”

  While Harriman was coping with the issue of British assets, he and Winant were faced with another difficulty: the growing expectation by Churchill and many of his countrymen that the United States would enter the war by late spring or early summer of 1941. There were several reasons for that misplaced belief, among them Harry Hopkins’s “whither thou goest” speech; a comment by Wendell Willkie that if Roosevelt was reelected in 1940, the United States would be in the war by April; and the passage of Lend-Lease itself. Hopkins himself had tried to tamp down such hope, as did Harriman and Winant after him.

  Although Lend-Lease was a huge step in the escalation of U.S. involvement, the American envoys warned that it must not be viewed as the decisive one. Again and again, they sought to make clear to officials and the British public the strength of the U.S. isolationist movement and the vagaries of American politics and government, particularly the system of separation of powers. Churchill, who had an American mother, liked to boast that he had a firm understanding of the U.S. political system. In fact, he and those in his government never fully grasped how very different it was from their own parliamentary system, where the executive and legislature were harnessed together and where party divisions were, for the most part, kept under control.