Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour
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John Gilbert Winant.
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Gil Winant, caught in the middle of shaving, in a lighthearted moment with two fellow American pilots in France during World War I.
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John Gilbert Winant, first chairman of the Social Security Board, meets with his two fellow commissioners, Arthur J. Altmeyer (left) and Vincent M. Miles (right) in 1935. SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION HISTORY ARCHIVES
Edward R. Murrow, in the uniform of a U.S. war correspondent, shortly after the United States entered World War II.
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A young Ed Murrow, dressed in the tattered shirt and jeans he wore as a lumberjack, his summer job during high school and college. Years later, in London, Murrow would tell friends that “there was a satisfaction about that life” and that “he had never known that kind of satisfaction since.”
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Ed Murrow with his wife, Janet, soon after their marriage in 1934.
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Ed Murrow in downtown London in 1941.
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Averell Harriman, the new Lend-Lease administrator for Britain, at his office in London in mid-1941.
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Averell Harriman learned to ride at a very young age at his father’s sprawling estate in New York. He went on to become a world-class polo player.
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In his thirties, Harriman spent most of his time chasing business deals all over Europe, including a manganese concession in the new Soviet Union and steel mills and an electric power plant in Poland.
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Harriman and his wife, Marie, enjoying a night out at the Stork Club in New York.
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Harriman on the slopes at Sun Valley, Idaho, which he transformed into the country’s premier ski resort in the late 1930s.
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George VI greets John Gilbert Winant, the new U.S. ambassador to Britain, at the Windsor train station in March 1941. The king’s unprecedented gesture—venturing outside his palace to welcome a newly arrived foreign envoy—underscored the importance that Britain attached to U.S. help in fighting off Hitler and the Germans. BRITISH PATHE/WPA FILM LIBRARY
Members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British army, manning an antiaircraft gun in London during the war.
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Firemen work to put out a blaze caused by a massive German bombing attack on downtown London during the Blitz in late 1940.
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Pamela Churchill takes a stroll with her toddler son, Winston, on a London street in 1942. The year before, Churchill’s daughter-in-law embarked on an affair with Averell Harriman, and when Harriman was named U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1943, she became involved with Ed Murrow. Some thirty years later, she married Harriman. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Sarah Churchill, the prime minister’s favorite daughter, was the peacemaker of her family. She and John Gilbert Winant had an intense wartime relationship. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Members of the Eagle Squadron, an all-American unit who defied their country’s neutrality laws to fight with the Royal Air Force before the United States entered the war. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Looking very pleased at being at the center of the action, Averell Harriman sits between Winston Churchill and Russian leader Joseph Stalin in Moscow in August 1942. Harriman wangled an invitation to the Churchill-Stalin session, one of many such summit meetings he would attend during the war.
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Two young British servicewomen unload Winchester rifles just arrived from the United States, as part of the U.S. Lend-Lease agreement with Britain.
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John Gilbert Winant and his wife, Constance (next to Winant), welcome General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Admiral Harold Stark, the two highest-ranking U.S. military leaders in London, at a July 4, 1942, reception at the ambassador’s offical residence. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
John Gilbert Winant with Winston Churchill and Joseph Davies, former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, at Chequers, the prime minister’s official country home. Winant and Harriman spent many weekends with the Churchills at Chequers. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
U.S. servicemen buy goods not available for sale to the British at a U.S. military post exchange in London. American forces in Britain had a much higher standard of living than did most British citizens. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Eighteen-year-old Tommy Hitchcock in his French aviator’s uniform. Hitchcock, who flew with the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I and was the youngest American to win a pilot’s wings in the conflict, shot down two German planes before being shot down himself.
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Widely regarded as the best polo player in the world, Hitchcock helped make polo one of the most popular spectator sports in America in the 1920s and ’30s.
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Thanks to Gil Winant, Hitchcock became assistant military attaché in the American embassy in London, where he played a key role in the U.S. adoption of the P-51B Mustang, the fighter plane that helped make D-Day possible.
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A Mustang undergoes a test flight in California. After the war, a top U.S. Air Force official acknowledged that the plane appeared in the fight against Germany “at just the saving moment, in the very nick of time.”
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In a tender wartime moment, an American soldier buys a corsage from a flower seller in London’s Piccadilly Circus and pins it on his girlfriend’s jacket.
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Ed Murrow, with his ever-present cigarette, prepares a newscast at the CBS bureau in London.
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President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill meet with Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek at the Cairo Conference in November 1943. Also attending were Gil Winant (behind Roosevelt) and Averell Harriman (behind Madame Chiang Kai-shek). Presidential aide Harry Hopkins is at the extreme right.
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Housewives in suburban London hand out tea and food in June 1944 to American troops on their way to the southern coast of England—and Normandy. GETTY IMAGES
General Dwight D. Eisenhower stands between his two principal British bête noires—General Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, on the left, and General Bernard Montgomery, on the right. Scornful of Eisenhower’s military ability, both British generals were constantly second-guessing him.
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Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Harriman is behind Stalin and Roosevelt. Standing on the right is Sarah Churchill, acting as aide-de-camp to her father, and British foreign secretary Anthony Eden. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
General Eisenhower receives the Freedom of the City of London, an honor dating back to medieval days, in an elaborate ceremony in late June 1945, shortly after the Allies’ victory in Europe.
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Jubilant young American servicemen celebrate V-E Day—May 8, 1945—with London residents in Piccadilly Circus.
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Ed and Janet Murrow with their son, Casey, a couple of years after the war.
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There were, however, at least three prominent exceptions to the no-combat rule. James Stewart, who recently had won an Academy Award for his acting in The Philadelphia Story, was the commander of a U.S. bomber squadron, based near Norwich, that flew B-24s on missions over Germany. Stewart, who flew twenty missions himself, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his courage and coolness under fire. Another popular Hollywood star, Clark Gable, accompanied U.S. bomber crews on several raids for a short training film that he produced on aerial gunnery.
On one mission, he was nearly killed when a German shell ripped through his plane.
Director William Wyler and his crew, meanwhile, flew five B-17 missions to France and Germany in mid-1943 while filming Wyler’s famed documentary on the bomber Memphis Belle. “The guy had guts,” Memphis Belle’s navigator said of the Hollywood director, who, before one mission, persuaded the pilot to break regulations and let him ride in the ball turret under the aircraft’s belly during takeoff and landing—an extraordinarily dangerous maneuver—so that he could get film of the wheels and runway.
To Wyler’s intense embarrassment, his Oscar-winning film Mrs. Miniver premiered in London while he was making Memphis Belle. The story of the experiences of an upper-middle-class family in the London suburbs at the time of the British evacuation at Dunkirk and the Blitz, Mrs. Miniver was America’s top-grossing film in 1942 and a huge success in Britain the following year; Churchill, who loved it, called it “propaganda worth a hundred battleships.” Wyler, who was intensely pro-British, had indeed meant the film as propaganda. “I was a warmonger,” he said. “I was concerned about Americans being isolationists.” But when he arrived in Britain and saw the reality of war—the flattened houses, malnourished people, shabby cities, and the horrific casualties among British and American bomber crews—he came to regard Mrs. Miniver as little more than a sugarcoated, idealized portrait of the conflict. It “only scratched the surface of war,” he remarked. Years later, Wyler declared that, for him, the war, with all its horror and heroism, had been “an escape into reality.”
APART FROM WYLER, Stewart, Gable, and a few others, the American notables in Britain lived in a walled-off world of cocktail parties and black-market restaurants, with virtually no idea of what life was like outside their comfortable cocoons. The London of these American newcomers was “unreal, a stage on which a play called ‘the war’ was running,” observed Mary Lee Settle, the young West Virginian who had worked in the British embassy in Washington and who later spent a year as a WAAF on an RAF base in southwest England. “Even the uniforms they wore were like costumes—well-cut, no grease marks, no ground-in dirt, no fading…. Most of them had no experience of the strictures we lived by … no inkling of what it was like to live on rationing or of scrounging unrationed food, of standing in queues hour after hour, gray-faced with fatigue.”
When Britain entered the war, Settle and her husband were living in New York, where she worked as a model and he as an advertising executive. He immediately enlisted in the Canadian forces, and she sought to join the WAAF. “We were young and zealous, and we knew we were right,” she later wrote. “For the first time in our lives, we thought about something beyond ourselves and for the common good.” After more than a year of fighting red tape, she finally made it to England and became a radio operator at an RAF base in the Cotswolds, transmitting orders and messages between flight controllers and pilots.
As an aircraft woman 2nd class, Settle was part of what the British call the other ranks (enlisted men and women) and, as such, was exposed to the “cold, brutal division” between officers and those subordinate to them, most of whom came from the working class. “It was my first glimpse of the [class] stratification, almost Chinese in its complication and formality, which covered everything from a hairdo to a state of health … and by which each Englishman holds himself apart from his fellows,” she noted. Like her counterparts, Settle lived a harsh, austere life, sleeping on a straw mattress in a Nissen hut heated by a stove barely warm to the touch, hauling coal, cleaning floors, and subsisting on a spartan diet that left her perpetually hungry and dreaming of food.
After a year of exposure over her headset to a constant buzzing caused by the German jamming of airwaves, Settle developed what doctors called “signals shock” and could no longer function efficiently at her job. Handed a medical discharge, she was hired as an OWI writer in London, where she found herself thrust into an Alice-in-Wonderland world of luxury and comfort, “as heady as champagne,” for which she was not prepared. Like most American civilians working in a professional capacity in war zones, she was given a temporary officer’s rank (in her case, major) and thus had access to the wondrous U.S. military post exchanges, where one could buy American cigarettes, chocolate, razor blades, fruit juice, soap, toothpaste, shaving cream, handkerchiefs, and dozens of other consumer items that were to be found nowhere else in Britain. She no longer had to endure the harshness of British cigarettes, which in any case were so scarce that when she smoked one and the butt became too short to hold in her fingers, she used a pin to keep it steady while she eked out the last few precious puffs.
During the day, Settle, who was to become a noted novelist after the war, lived and worked in “a caul of privilege” that her OWI co-workers and the other Americans with whom she associated seemed to take for granted. At night, she returned to the room she rented in a threadbare, fifth-floor Kensington walk-up, where her landlady regarded the American candy bars she brought home from the PX as a precious treat and sliced them into tiny pieces, serving them on china plates for afternoon tea.
To her co-workers, the pretty, auburn-haired Settle was as much of an oddity as they were to her. “I had had the experience and directly touched the war they had come to share,” she recalled. “What I had learned to take for granted—service in the forces—was, to them, a fascination. It made them seem somehow younger than I was.” When she first arrived at OWI, the actors Burgess Meredith and Paul Douglas, who were making U.S. government films in London, decided that, having lived on British rations for so long, she was too thin and in desperate need of a good meal. Treating her “as if I were bone china,” they escorted Settle to a black-market restaurant with mahogany paneling, leather banquettes, damask napkins, and the overpowering smell of food. The actors insisted on ordering for her: a two-inch-thick lamb chop, green beans, and a baked potato slathered with a two-week ration of butter. The rich aromas of the meat and butter were too much for Settle. She excused herself and barely made it to the ladies’ room before she became violently ill.
THERE WAS ANOTHER young woman in London, however, who had come to accept such luxuries as a matter of course. Thanks to the largesse of Averell Harriman and other wealthy American friends, Pamela Churchill had become one of the capital’s leading hostesses, throwing sparkling dinner parties featuring such prized items as oysters, salmon, steaks, and whiskey. “We were really sort of puritanical in England about rationing,” recalled John Colville. “But if you dined with Pamela, you would have a five-or six-course dinner … and foods you didn’t ordinarily see. My guess is that all of us around the table were sort of smirking and saying that Averell was taking good care of his girlfriend.” Years later, Pamela would observe: “It was a terrible war, but if you were the right age … and in the right place, it was spectacular.”
In April 1942, Pamela, Harriman, and his daughter had moved out of the Dorchester Hotel and into a spacious flat in the same Grosvenor Square building where Gil Winant lived. It soon became apparent that the prime minister’s daughter-in-law was, in fact, living with Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease representative. “They were caught out and people were a bit upset because he had a wife,” said an acquaintance of Pamela’s. “Living with him took it over the line. It wasn’t discreet…. We thought she was being very stupid and naughty.”
When Randolph Churchill came home on leave and discovered the affair, he exploded with rage. His anger stemmed not so much from jealousy, friends said, but from a sense of having been betrayed by Harriman, whom he had befriended in Cairo at his father’s request. Randolph bitterly accused his parents of condoning adultery “beneath their own roof” at Chequers and doing it solely because of the importance of Harriman and the Americans to Britain. “He used terrible language and created a rift that never healed,” said Alastair Forbes, a friend of both Randolph and Mary Churchill’s. “He said they must have known, and they said they didn’t know.” According to Pamela, Randolph, from whom she was now estranged, threatened at one
point to make her affair with Harriman public, a situation “that might do a lot of harm to people in high places.” To mollify him, she agreed “to find a place of my own in the country … and not see too much of his parents.”*
Another problem for the couple was Marie Harriman’s discovery of their relationship. A worldly woman who was involved with the bandleader Eddy Duchin, Marie was less bothered by the affair itself than by the fact that others knew about it. “Keep your affairs clean and out of the papers,” she cabled her husband, “or you will be facing the most costly divorce in the history of the republic.” Painfully aware that a split from Marie would not only put a serious dent in his net worth but ruin his budding diplomatic career, Harriman agreed to stop seeing Pamela—a promise on which he promptly reneged. “Ave couldn’t marry her,” said a friend, “but he didn’t want to give her up.”
Pamela moved out of the Harrimans’ apartment and into a luxury flat at 49 Grosvenor Square, around the corner from the Harrimans’ and across the street from the Connaught Hotel. In addition to paying for the apartment, her lover provided her with a car and gasoline ration and gave her a yearly allowance of £3,000, a princely amount at the time. The only British citizen to take up residence in her building, Pamela had become thoroughly Americanized. Most of her friends and acquaintances were now American; on the bookshelf in her drawing room were photographs of Harriman, Eisenhower, Harry Hopkins, and Roosevelt, who had sent the portrait of himself to her. In her letter of thanks, she told FDR: “My son is not yet old enough to distinguish between [the photos of] you and Winston. I am afraid he calls both of you Grandpapa.” She spent much of her time entertaining newly arrived American journalists, generals, and government officials—hosting dinners for them, taking them around town, and, in general, introducing them to London. Janet Murrow, who attended one of Pamela’s dinners, felt very much out of place. “Unless you were important in some way, you weren’t very welcome there,” she noted.