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

by Lynne Olson

  For many GIs just arrived in Britain, the contrast between the conditions at home and those at their new posting came as a severe shock. “I think it would be easier for me to tell you what wasn’t rationed over here, except that I can’t think of anything that isn’t,” an American lieutenant wrote to his mother. “For instance, they get two ounces of butter a week. Mom, you can put a whole week’s ration on two slices of bread. Try it and then you can see what the British are down to…. Do you realize, Mom, that many people over here haven’t been able to buy any new clothes since 1939? And they are lucky if they see one egg in a fortnight…. My impression in the short time that I have been here is that the Americans haven’t shown much in the way of sacrifices to further the war effort, in comparison with the English.”

  As the young lieutenant indicated, the war was experienced in a profoundly different way in Britain than it was in America. While both countries endured rationing and the grief of losing hundreds of thousands of young men, the conflict remained remote for most people in the United States, causing far less deprivation and suffering than in Britain or occupied Europe. There was no bombing of the U.S. mainland, no civilian casualties, no destruction of millions of homes. Indeed, while the standard of living plummeted for the vast majority of Britons during the war, many if not most Americans lived better than ever before. “No war is ‘good,’ ” British historian David Reynolds has remarked, “but America’s war was about as good as one could get.”

  Thanks to the massive mobilization of industry, the American economy was booming, finally putting an end to the privations of the Great Depression. In 1940, more than 14 percent of the country’s workforce was still unemployed; three years later, the number of unemployed had dropped to less than 2 percent. The annual income of Americans had risen by more than 50 percent, and many in the country were now earning wages beyond their wildest dreams just a few years earlier. Even with the rationing of certain food and other items, there were plenty of goods on which to spend money. Between 1939 and 1944, U.S. consumer spending on food increased by 8 percent and on clothing and shoes by 23 percent.

  “There was money to burn, and it burned in a bright, gay flame,” observed Eric Sevareid, who was appalled at what he saw as America’s lack of willingness to sacrifice. “Fifth Avenue shops sold handkerchiefs embroidered with patriotic monograms for ten dollars apiece, newsreels pointed out the military motif in the latest fashions, resort hotels ran out of space…. The nation was encouraged to believe that it could produce its way to victory or buy its victory by the simple measure of writing a check. Life was easy and getting more prosperous every week, and nobody believed in death.”

  Rationing was not imposed in the United States until several months after Pearl Harbor. Hoping to avoid mandatory controls altogether, Roosevelt initially tried to persuade the American people to make voluntary cutbacks in their consumption of food and consumer goods on behalf of the war effort. While many Americans did what he asked, most did not. As a result, some goods became scarce, prices skyrocketed, and inflation set in. In April 1942, the president, declaring the need for “an equality of sacrifice,” proposed higher taxes, wage and price controls, and comprehensive rationing.

  Much less stringent than the controls in Britain, the U.S. rationing system, when finally introduced in the late spring of 1942, resulted in serious inconvenience rather than austerity. Eggs, which were almost nonexistent in Britain, became a meat substitute in America. Margarine took the place of butter, and when sugar was rationed, it was replaced by corn syrup and saccharin. Although severely restricted by gasoline and tire rationing, American motorists never had to give up their cars entirely, as most British car owners were forced to do. In Britain, a man could buy a new suit only once every two years, while in the United States, men could purchase all the suits they wanted, albeit now with cuffless trousers and narrower jacket lapels. Women’s dresses were shorter and pleatless. As a result of iron and steel shortages, the production of a wide variety of U.S. consumer goods, from refrigerators to vacuum cleaners to washing machines, was halted for the duration.

  While many U.S. citizens found these cutbacks galling, Americans who returned to their homeland after a stint in wartime Britain found it to be a paradise of abundance by comparison. Among the expatriates was Tania Long, a London-based correspondent for the New York Times, who came back to New York for a visit in late 1943. “Aside from the general atmosphere of freedom and plenty, the first thing a woman notices upon returning to this city is how dowdy she looks—and how well dressed every other woman is,” Long wrote in the Times. “To a woman accustomed to shop in stores with half-empty shelves, a coupon book in one hand and a shopping bag in another, an expedition into one of New York’s department stores is like a fabulous journey through the pages of ‘The Arabian Nights.’ There is so much of everything, and everything is so beautiful and enticing.”

  The same was true for food, she wrote. “Although New Yorkers grumble over the fact that they may no longer get steak and other luxuries in restaurants and at the butcher shops, a person just back from Britain has a hard time deciding what to choose from the many tempting dishes on a menu…. Alternating between cabbage, Brussels sprouts and spinach for two years, one forgets the existence of squash, fresh peas, corn, eggplant, and tomatoes.” Her trip, Long said, had convinced her that “London and New York truly belong in different worlds. To attempt to draw a comparison between the two is almost as futile as it would be to try and compare the earth with Mars.”

  In the United States, unlike in Britain, most citizens never felt that their country’s survival was at stake during the war and thus were less inclined to make the sacrifices for which the Roosevelt administration was calling. Frances Perkins would later note: “Most parts of the war didn’t interest [Americans]. Sure, they wanted the boys to have everything and to win, but they still couldn’t see why they couldn’t have butter.”

  When the Roosevelt administration announced that because of the rubber shortage, girdles would no longer be manufactured, there was such a violent outcry from women across the country that the government capitulated, declaring that foundation garments were a vital part of a woman’s wardrobe and would continue to be produced. “The American people, who were so willing and proud to give whatever was required of them in blood and sweat, were loudly reluctant to cut down on their normal consumption of red meat and gasoline and their use of such essentials as electric toasters and elastic girdles,” Robert Sherwood observed. “More than any other people on earth, Americans were addicted to the principle that you can eat your cake and have it, which was entirely understandable, for Americans have been assured from the cradle that ‘there is always more cake from where that came from.’ ” Exasperated by his countrymen’s sense of detachment from the war, Roosevelt told Harold Ickes: “It really would be a good thing for us if a few German bombs could be dropped over here.”

  In Washington, members of Congress fought Roosevelt’s call for higher taxes, tried to eviscerate the Office of Price Control, and insisted they were entitled to unlimited gasoline supplies because, they argued, their driving was essential for the war effort. “The very men to whom the whole country looks to set an example and to encourage the public to accept the personal inconvenience are doing exactly the reverse,” Raymond Clapper, a noted Washington newspaper columnist, wrote in disgust. “Instead of trying to cooperate, they are cackling like wet hens to hold their special privileges.”

  Even with Washington’s characteristic Southern lassitude swallowed up in the frantic busyness of a mushrooming bureaucracy, the American capital still seemed curiously untouched by the worldwide conflict. To Eric Sevareid, Washington “seemed to be no part of the war, however vast its work for war.” Roosevelt thought that there was “less realization of the actual war effort in Washington D.C. than anywhere else.” The capital’s lights still glowed brightly at night, and its social life was, if anything, considerably more hectic than it had been before December 1
941. There were hunt breakfasts, lunches, tea dances, dinners—and, of course, an endless round of cocktail parties and diplomatic receptions. The society editor of the Washington Post justified such merrymaking by claiming it provided a venue for “influential people … to transact business, make contacts and otherwise advance the war effort.”

  Mary Lee Settle, a twenty-one-year-old former model from West Virginia who worked at the British embassy in Washington, was among those caught up in the capital’s feverish social life. Settle, who was married to a British citizen, later remarked that the parties she attended in Washington reminded her of the depiction in Tolstoy’s War and Peace of the socializing in St. Petersburg at the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. As was true of the aristocrats in the Russian capital, the denizens of Washington were constantly talking about the war with no real knowledge or experience of what it was about. Both cities, she wrote, were unreal places, “where manners were important and gestures meant more than action, and war was someplace else.”

  AS THEY OBSERVED the United States trying to come to grips with rationing and other wartime restraints, longtime American residents of London were unimpressed by what they viewed as their countrymen’s paltry efforts to give up their comforts for the common good. After reading a self-congratulatory story in her hometown newspaper about townspeople going without meat one day a week, Janet Murrow fired off an irate letter to her parents. The article, she wrote, “makes one want to cry. So little apparently does our country understand the plight in which the rest of the world finds itself. What is one meatless day? … I should like to point out that the meat ration here almost never stretches further than two meals a week. Since Christmas, I have had five real eggs—the first in months—people sent them for Christmas presents…. Americans will never come to this fare, but they’ll have to make an approach far greater than one meatless day a week if the rest of the world is going to regain its health.”

  In a letter to Harry Hopkins, Averell Harriman echoed Janet Murrow’s criticism. “It was all very well when the British were suitors for our favor to expect them to make the biggest sacrifices while we were living off the fat of the land,” Harriman wrote. “Now they look on us as partners, and when we ask them to make sacrifices, they expect us to do the same…. There are a lot of things on the American end which are hard for the British to understand.”

  Yet, throughout his stay in London, Harriman made sure that he and his daughter rarely, if ever, had to go without the large and small luxuries to which they had grown accustomed back home. At a time when liquor and wine were virtually unobtainable, for example, Harriman imported cases of Roederer champagne, Château Margaux, gin, and Canadian whiskey from the United States.

  Kathleen Harriman, for her part, never had to experience the pinch of clothes rationing. In a February 1942 letter to her stepmother, she noted how she walked into the London showroom of the House of Worth and “bought a beautiful black evening [gown]—the model—because I can’t stand having umpteen fittings.” Later, she thanked her stepmother for sending a trunkful of new designer clothes from New York, exclaiming: “It’s such fun to be in the state of not knowing which of three new dresses to wear in the evening. Even though there’s an awful lot of talk about London looking out-of-the-elbows after three years of clothes rationing, I can’t say I look forward to me joining that group. As it is, Averell kicks when I wear ‘old clothes’ in the country.”

  It was important for Kathleen to look her best because the social whirl in London for her and other well-connected Americans had never been more frenetic. The British capital was now the wartime base for some of the most noted names in American business and cultural life—investment bankers, heirs to great fortunes, company heads, playwrights, actors, movie directors, broadcast executives, newspaper and magazine publishers and editors—who joined the OSS and OWI or were given military desk jobs.

  Despite its dilapidation, London was an undeniably exciting place to be during the war. Sergeant Robert Arbib, a New Yorker who first came there in 1942, was among the many American newcomers entranced by its exuberance and zest. “London was one of the most crowded cities in the world and one of the most fascinating,” he recalled. “It swarmed with scores of different uniforms and it spoke in a hundred different tongues. On Saturday evenings it was almost bedlam…. I always thought of it as the hub of the world in those days. London was the Babel, the Metropolis, the Mecca. London was It.”

  In the year prior to D-Day, London contained, said Harrison Salisbury, “the fastest company I had ever seen.” Many of the newcomers were friends and longtime associates of Harriman’s from the East Coast—wealthy businessmen, bankers, and lawyers with Ivy League degrees and, in some cases, impeccable social pedigrees who had lived their lives, according to an observer, “with a feeling that the … century was about to be placed in their charge.” Most of them were internationalist in outlook, having spent considerable time in England and on the Continent since childhood. Like Harriman, they had been active in urging the Roosevelt administration to aid Britain since before the United States entered the war.

  Among the members of this elite was David Bruce, the son-in-law of the financier Andrew Mellon, who had been recruited by General William Donovan, the founder of the OSS, to head the intelligence agency’s London headquarters. (For his London office, Donovan also hired, among others, Junius Morgan of the New York banking family; Lester Armour of the Chicago meatpacking Armours; and Raymond Guest, a champion polo player and horse breeder—thus earning OSS the sobriquet “Oh So Social.”)

  At first glance, the choice of Bruce, a Virginia patrician whose wealth came from his Mellon connections, was an odd one for such an important post: he had no experience in intelligence work or, for that matter, in serious, sustained employment of any kind. Viewed by the press and many of his peers as a charming dilettante, he had dabbled in investment banking, briefly served in the Foreign Service, and was elected to one term each in the Virginia and Maryland state legislatures. But he also had spent considerable time in London, including a stint during the Blitz as a representative of the American Red Cross, and had built up a daunting array of contacts in British society and government. Possessing “an abounding self-esteem and consciousness of superiority,” the urbane Bruce was as at ease with British aristocrats and American generals as he was with exiled European leaders. He frequently invited members of all three groups to dinner or cocktails at White’s, the most exclusive men’s club in London, where no bottle of nonvintage wine was ever served and no woman ever allowed to enter. Like Harriman, Bruce managed to live exceedingly well in the British capital, filling his diary with accounts of the lavish meals he enjoyed, like the dinner at White’s that included smoked salmon, lamb, Brussels sprouts, potatoes, prune tart, cocktails, a 1924 Château Margaux, and vintage port.

  Another recruit to U.S. government service in London was John Hay “Jock” Whitney, the playboy prince of New York society, whose enormous family fortune had blessed him with an annual income of more than $1 million, as well as six homes, two private planes, a yacht, and a string of twenty polo ponies. Whitney, whose Green Tree Stables had produced some of America’s finest racehorses and who had provided much of the financing for the movie Gone With the Wind, was now acting as a public information officer at the U.S. Eighth Air Force headquarters. He got the job, according to one source, because he was “one of the few available men who were awed neither by the sight of a newspaper reporter nor by the sound of a British accent.” (Whitney’s counterpart at U.S. naval headquarters in London was Barry Bingham, owner and publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal.)

  The grandson of John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary and the secretary of state under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, Whitney was well acquainted with London. In 1926, to celebrate the victory of one of his horses in a British race, he threw a party that according to the New York Times was “the most elaborate and costly party” seen in London in over a
decade. During the war, he leased a spacious luxury apartment on Grosvenor Square, where he staged soirees renowned for their fine food and drink and beautiful female guests.

  Enjoying the feminine companionship at Whitney’s parties was, among others, William Paley, who, like many of his New York counterparts, saw the war as a way not only of serving his country but of exchanging the tedium of family and business obligations for the exhilaration of freewheeling London. After setting up Allied radio stations for the OWI in North Africa and Italy, the CBS chairman was assigned, with the rank of colonel, to Eisenhower’s staff in the British capital as chief of psychological warfare broadcasting in Europe. He lived at Claridge’s, where he had a personal valet and frequently dined on such delicacies as cold salmon, lobster, and fresh asparagus. Of the war, he would later remark that “life had never been so exciting and immediate and never would be again.”

  To his subordinates, Paley was noted more for his love of pleasure than for his devotion to hard work. For him, as for others, the romantic fatalism and hedonism of wartime London were particularly appealing. He could eat, drink, and have as many affairs as he liked, with very little chance that tomorrow, or anytime soon, he would die—since, like most of the other New York and Hollywood dignitaries in Britain, he never saw combat. In the eyes of many in the career U.S. military, Paley and the other former civilians were “bourbon whiskey colonels” with “cellophane commissions” (“you could see through them, but they kept the draft off”).