by Lynne Olson
Winant and Harriman kept emphasizing that Roosevelt did not lead Congress the way Churchill led Parliament. According to the U.S. Constitution, it was up to Congress, not the president, to declare war. And, in the spring of 1941, American legislators, many of them isolationists, were nowhere close to doing so.
* Many in the Democratic Party, even some who were fervent FDR supporters, were uncomfortable about his breaking precedent and seeking a third term. Democrats were also unhappy over Roosevelt’s insistence that Wallace, who was the secretary of agriculture and who was unpopular with most of the party faithful, must be selected as his new vice presidential running mate.
APRIL 16, 1941, WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY—SUNNY AND WARM—AND Janet Murrow was determined to take full advantage of it. She coaxed her husband away from work long enough to take her to dinner at L’Etoile, a little French bistro in Soho that had become their favorite restaurant in London.
The streets that evening were crowded with other London residents basking in the glorious weather. The bitter winter was over at last, and daffodils and hyacinths were blooming everywhere. But the real tonic for people’s spirits was the absence of German bombers: there had been no major raid on London in more than a month. Londoners had finally begun to lose “that ghastly, tired, haunted look they had, with red-rimmed eyes that were sunk in their heads … caused by fright and sleepless nights,” one woman wrote in her diary. The fear that invaded most people’s minds at dusk was rapidly fading.
Even Ed Murrow had begun to relax. Over dinner, he and Janet chatted about friends, books, movies—anything but the war. On their way out, they stopped at nearby tables to say hello to friends from the BBC, for whom L’Etoile was also a favorite hangout. Enjoying the soft spring air and the full moon that made navigating the blackout considerably easier, they strolled home, past stately cream-colored houses with peeling paint and an occasional gap, covered with rubble, where a house or shop had once stood.
Just before reaching their flat, they heard the familiar banshee cry of sirens, a distant throb of aircraft engines, and the muffled sound of explosions to the south. But the lovely night still cast its spell, and Murrow suggested they stop for a pint at the Devonshire Arms, their neighborhood pub and another favorite gathering place for the BBC. Janet, however, felt a prickle of fear. Like every other resident of the city, she knew that a full moon usually meant heavy bombing raids. But this was something more: she had a premonition, she later said, that they shouldn’t go to the pub that night. “I’m really scared,” she told her husband. “I’d be grateful if you’d walk home with me.” Reluctantly he agreed.
Almost as soon as they’d opened the door of their flat, there was the ear-splitting drone of planes overhead—hundreds of them, Janet thought—and a thunderous barrage of antiaircraft guns, followed by rapidly approaching bomb blasts. Climbing the stairs to the roof, the Murrows looked out over a city blazing with light: flares bursting like Roman candles, searchlights crisscrossing the heavens, and fires blossoming everywhere.
Suddenly, they heard a more ominous sound, the freight-train whistle of a bomb that seemed to be aimed straight at them. Running back inside, they crouched in the stairwell, their arms cradling their heads. A deafening explosion rocked the building, throwing them up against the wall. “It’s the office,” Murrow shouted, and they raced back to the roof. From there, they witnessed a hellish scene: Duchess Street, where the CBS office was located, was ablaze, as were most of the streets nearby. Houses began collapsing with a dull roar, and the harsh, rank smell of plaster dust filled the air. The Devonshire Arms had disappeared. The bomb that narrowly missed the Murrows’ building had scored a direct hit on the pub, leaving nothing but a gaping black hole. A towering pillar of dust, debris, smoke, and sparks mushroomed up to the sky.
Grabbing his tin hat, Murrow rushed downstairs and out the door. From her bedroom window, Janet, more terrified than she had ever been in her life, watched the flames, knowing that “many of our friends were gone.” The world, she wrote in her diary, “was upside down.”
A FEW MILES AWAY, in Grosvenor Square, Gil Winant had been working in his office when the sirens began their howl. Moments later, he heard the scream of a bomb and a massive explosion, followed by the crash of breaking glass: all his office windows had been shattered. Picking himself up off the floor, the ambassador, accompanied by two aides and his wife, who had just arrived in London for a visit, climbed to the embassy’s roof to survey the damage. An incendiary bomb had set ablaze the vacant Italian embassy next door, and U.S. embassy employees were working frantically to put the fire out. Across the street, a lovely Georgian townhouse had been demolished, and all the windows of John Adams’s old residence were blasted out. On nearby Oxford Street, flames were devouring one of London’s major department stores. Mayfair, like the Murrows’ neighborhood near Regent’s Park, was now an inferno, as was much of the rest of London.
As the raid continued, Winant and the embassy’s political attaché, Theodore Achilles, headed out into the streets to take stock of the damage. Wearing his battered felt hat, the ambassador ignored the crump of bombs in the distance and the shrapnel crackling down around him. He and Achilles walked for miles through dust and smoke so thick it was hard to see more than a couple of feet ahead of them. They passed the smoking ruins of a building just as the bodies of several young nurses were carried out. They visited packed shelters and stopped to watch a fireman atop an extension ladder battling flames on a building’s roof, seemingly oblivious to the bombs falling around him. Again and again, the ambassador asked the people he encountered—air raid wardens, firemen, rescue workers, those in the shelters—if there was any help he could give.
It was a typical Winant gesture, Achilles later noted. He recalled that the ambassador’s first words to him when he arrived in London were: “Now that I am here, what can I do to help?” Winant’s whole approach to his job, Achilles added, was “based in human terms. To those preparing economic reports for him on the situation in Great Britain, he would say time and again, ‘Give it to me in the form of shoes, in the form of clothing….’ He saw air raids in terms of individuals, of the human tragedy which resulted from the nightly bombings.”
Winant and Achilles walked until dawn, a little after the all-clear siren sounded at 5 A.M. following eight hours of continuous bombing. There was now blue sky and sunshine, but only if one looked straight up; at eye level, a pall of gray smoke still cloaked the city. As the weary ambassador and attaché headed back to the embassy, firemen were hosing down the charred remains of buildings while the fortunate Londoners whose homes were still intact—if somewhat battered— were outside with brooms and shovels, cleaning up the debris and shattered glass.
Back in his office, Winant called friends and acquaintances, both British and American, to make sure they were all right. One of his calls was to the Murrows. They were fine, Janet replied, although Ed had lost his office, his third so far, and more than thirty people had died in the Devonshire Arms, many of whom were friends of theirs. Writing to her mother later that day about the raid’s ferocity, she remarked: “I see no reason why anybody should be alive this morning.”
A number of people had recognized Winant that night, and the news of his travels around the West End spread quickly throughout Britain, first by word of mouth and then in newspaper stories and on the BBC. Several of the articles underscored the sharp contrast between the new ambassador and his predecessor, who, before he retreated to the United States at the height of the Blitz, escaped every night to a country retreat near Windsor. For many Britons, Winant’s presence on the streets of London during the horrific April 16 attack, and in raids to come, was the first tangible evidence that Americans did indeed care what happened to them. “His personality captured the imagination of the entire country as no other ambassador in modern times has been able to do,” remarked Virginia Cowles, an American journalist who worked briefly for Winant in London. “He became a symbol to the people of Great Britain �
�� and made the office of American ambassador known to virtually every person there.”
Sir Arthur Salter, the British undersecretary of shipping and a friend of Winant’s, concurred. In Salter’s view, the ambassador “typified to the British people the best side of America…. He showed that he was deeply and passionately attached to the British and to their fight against Hitler and Nazism. He believed in all that Britain was fighting for.” As a result, Salter said, many Britons “developed an unquestioning belief” that Winant was right when he emphasized the importance of close ties between Britain and the United States both during and after the war.
AN ESTIMATED 1,100 Londoners were killed during the April 16 raids—the most devastating night of the Blitz thus far. But it held that distinction for only three days; on April 19, German bombers hit London again, killing more than 1,200 persons. Almost half a million London residents lost their homes in the two attacks.
The capital, however, wasn’t the only British city suffering an especially severe pounding that spring. As part of the all-out German attempt to sever Britain’s supply lifeline and shut down production of war matériel, the Luftwaffe blasted the country’s major industrial and port cities, among them Manchester, Portsmouth, Cardiff, Plymouth, Liverpool, and Bristol. In Liverpool, six consecutive nights of bombing damaged or destroyed almost half the city’s docks, reducing the amount of supplies that could be unloaded from incoming ships to just a quarter of the normal tonnage.
Deeply concerned about the spirit of those living outside London, Churchill spent much of his time in morale-building visits to the bombed cities, often taking Harriman and Winant with him. “He seems to get confidence in having us around,” Harriman wrote to Roosevelt. But, as Harriman noted, Churchill had another reason for showing off the Americans. Whenever he spoke to those in the hinterlands, he would always introduce the two as Roosevelt’s envoys—”his way of letting the crowd know that America stood with them.”
Just days before the first April assault on London, Winant and Harriman traveled with the prime minister to several badly damaged port cities in southern England and Wales. As part of the tour, Winant was to receive an honorary doctorate from Churchill at the University of Bristol, which the prime minister served as chancellor.
After a visit to Swansea, Churchill’s party arrived in Bristol in the middle of a heavy raid, the sixth experienced by the busy seaport in the past five months. From the prime minister’s train, parked under a railway bridge outside the city, he and his entourage watched in dismay as bombs laid waste to a wide swath of Bristol, from the docks to the city center. At first light, they drove into the rubble-covered town, with fires still blazing, streets flooded from broken water mains, and residents searching the ruins of buildings for the dead and wounded. It was, John Colville later wrote in his diary, “devastation such as I had never thought possible.”
But when the people on the streets caught a glimpse of the familiar stout figure with his ever-present cigar and walking stick, they put aside all thoughts of their misery, at least for a moment, as they rushed toward him. It was the same everywhere, Winant wrote to Roosevelt. “The news of his presence spreads rapidly by word of mouth, and before he has gone far, crowds flock about him and people call out to him, ‘Hallo, Winnie,’ ‘Good old Winnie,’ ‘You will never let us down,’ ‘That’s a man.’ ”
In notes he took during the Bristol visit, Harriman described Churchill’s procession through the city: “He reviews the Home Guard—stiff at attention but a smile on their faces as he goes by. He stops to ask about a decoration—’From the last war, eh?’ Next comes the ARP wardens, then the volunteer firemen and finally the women.” Yet, as affecting as the prime minister’s performance was, Harriman was far more impressed by the people of Bristol. At one point, an elderly woman, who had just been rescued from her badly damaged house, was brought forward to meet the Churchills. She chatted for a moment, then said hurriedly: “I am sorry I can’t talk to you any longer. I must go and clean up my house.”
Jotting down in his notes the Bristol residents’ conversations with Churchill, Harriman—this former businessman who rarely showed emotion—was impassioned, even melodramatic: “They had been in the battle, tasted every fire … done their part … proud and unafraid. ‘See what he did—the Hun,’ they said. ‘He’ll come again but our boys will get him and then the new graves!’ ‘We’ll win in the end, won’t we?’ ”
That same defiance was evident at the University of Bristol, which continued with the ceremony to bestow honorary degrees on Winant and two other dignitaries despite the bombing of its Great Hall, where the event was to have taken place, and several other buildings on the grounds. Virtually all of the university’s faculty members and graduates who lined up for the procession had spent the night fighting fires or performing other rescue work. They marched into the small hall where the ceremony was held, their eyes bloodshot, their haggard faces streaked with grime, and the muddy, wet clothing under their academic gowns and richly colored hoods reeking of smoke.
The acrid smell of smoke also drifted in through the shattered windows of the hall, where, just a few hundred yards away, firemen were pouring water on blazes in nearby buildings. Every few minutes, those in attendance could hear the dull explosion of a delayed-action bomb. As Churchill began bestowing the degrees, the wife of Bristol’s lord mayor fainted—an incident that “seemed to underline the strain and nightmare of the recent hours,” Winant wrote.
When the prime minister left Bristol that afternoon, hundreds of townspeople came to the station to see him off. Watching them wave and cheer as the train pulled away, Churchill shielded his face with a newspaper to hide his tears. “They have such faith,” he told Harriman and Winant. “It is a grave responsibility.”
For his part, Harriman had been so moved by the courage of the Bristol residents that he sent a substantial cash gift to Clementine Churchill, asking her to forward it to the city’s lord mayor to help those who had lost their homes. In her note of thanks, Mrs. Churchill said she hoped that “all this pain and grief … may bring our two countries permanently together and that they may grow to understand each other. Anyhow, whatever happens, we do not feel alone any more.”
IN MANY OF THEIR letters and cables to Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, Winant and Harriman emphasized not only the resolution and valor of the British people but also the crucial role that ordinary citizens were playing in the conflict. The expression “people’s war” has been greatly overused, but there’s no question that the extraordinary volunteer effort in Britain was equaled by few if any other combatant countries in World War II.
Whenever the local or national governments failed to meet a need or solve a problem in Britain during the war, volunteers filled the void. Their response to the dismal conditions in London’s Underground stations and other public air raid shelters is a case in point. In most of the shelters, the authorities had made no arrangements for food, heat, beds, bathrooms, or washing facilities. “The stench was frightful—urine and excrement mixed with strong carbolic, sweat, and dirty, unwashed humanity,” one witness remarked of the shelters early in the Blitz.
Volunteers soon came to the rescue. Bathrooms were built out of salvaged materials; food was brought in; bunks and coal stoves appeared, as did armchairs and wireless sets in some shelters. London’s borough governments, shamed by their initial feeble and shoddy response, made structural and other improvements to the shelters. By the end of the Blitz, the majority of them had been transformed into reasonably comfortable places to spend the long, perilous nights.
The same was true for rest centers, where those who were bombed out of their homes could take temporary refuge. Government authorities had been overwhelmed by the massive homelessness created by German raids; in London alone, 1.4 million people—one in six residents—had lost their homes by the spring of 1941. Again, volunteers came to the fore, providing cots, meals, temporary housing, and other services.
What was particular
ly striking to American observers like Winant and Harriman was the dominant role that women played in the volunteer effort. “It is the spirit of the British women that is carrying this country through the frightful experience of bombing,” Harriman wrote a friend. To his wife, he remarked, “The women are the mainstay of England.” After a visit to London later in the war, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau wrote in his diary: “What the women in England were doing was just unbelievable…. If it were not for the women, England would cave in today.”
Many of the women to whom Harriman and Morgenthau referred were members of an organization called the Women’s Voluntary Service, created by the redoubtable widow of the Marquess of Reading, one of the most remarkable women in twentieth-century Britain. Her husband, a former ambassador to the United States who also had served as viceroy to India, believed that the future of democracy depended on a better understanding between the United States and Britain. She agreed. After Lord Reading’s death in 1935, she spent several months in America. Traveling throughout the country under the name of Mrs. Read, Lady Reading stayed in dollar-a-night hotel rooms and worked as a dishwasher in order to get to know working-class Americans. Among the people with whom she formed a friendship during her stay was Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, in London, she befriended the Murrows and Winant.
In 1938, the British Home Office asked Lady Reading if she would form an organization to recruit women for civil defense work in the event of war. She accepted the challenge but insisted that the scope of the Women’s Voluntary Service be greatly expanded. Any job that needed doing, she said, would be a task for her group.
When war was declared in 1939, WVS members, in their signature green tweed suits and red sweaters, helped evacuate children from London and other cities. A few months later, when exhausted British troops were evacuated from the French port of Dunkirk, women from the WVS were waiting for them at docks and railway stations with sandwiches and steaming-hot tea. After Hitler occupied most of the Continent, that “magnificent body of selfless women,” as one British mayor called the WVS, helped find housing for the thousands of European refugees who fled to Britain. Its members did the same for the homeless of their own country during the Blitz. They manned hundreds of rest centers, hostels, mobile libraries and canteens, and distributed thousands of tons of clothing and other supplies, collected from America and the Commonwealth, to the needy.