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

by Lynne Olson

  Winant also persuaded Roland Hayes, the famed black American tenor, to stay on in Britain after a concert tour and talk to black GIs around the country about their treatment by the Army. Hayes’s report, showing widespread discrimination, was sent to Eleanor Roosevelt, who passed it on to the Pentagon. The report, in turn, was transmitted to General Jacob Devers, the head of the Army’s European Theater of Operations in 1943, who promptly denied all such charges. After Walter White, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), made a trip to Britain in early 1944 to see for himself how black troops were treated, he reported to Mrs. Roosevelt that he had found “great unhappiness” among the men with whom he talked. At the same time, White was full of praise for the efforts of Eisenhower and Winant to alleviate the blacks’ situation, inadequate as they turned out to be.

  THERE’S NO QUESTION that the mistreatment of black troops was, in British eyes as well as in truth, a blot on the good name of the U.S. military and America itself. As Time magazine put it, “America’s polite, liquid-voiced, smartly uniformed Negro soldiers were a surprise, a pleasure, and a happy opportunity for [the British] to thumb the nose of moral self-righteousness at the U.S.” Yet, for all the problems created by race, and for all the other strains caused by the overwhelming American presence in Britain, it is remarkable that, in the end, this dramatic confrontation between two countries and cultures worked out as smoothly as it did.

  In the early spring of 1944, Sir Basil Liddell Hart, a noted British military commentator and strategist, traveled around England to gauge the temperature of American-British relations. While observing a number of instances of abrasive behavior by both U.S. soldiers and Britons, he concluded that he could “not think of any case in history” where relations between friendly occupiers and the country being invaded had been so good. “Still less,” he added, “can I recall any case where two great allied armies have got along so well.” A Ministry of Information report in mid-1944 noted “an increasingly kindly feeling toward U.S. troops” in the country, which it attributed to the fact that “people are getting to know the Americans better.”

  The relatively harmonious coexistence of U.S. soldiers and British civilians at a time of great stress and pressure owed much to the work of Eisenhower, Eden, and the other American and British officials who laid the groundwork and smoothed the way. But, in the view of some, the lion’s share of the credit belonged to Winant. According to The Nation, it was Winant, with his “firmness and good sense,” who found the solutions for most of the “problems, some of which assumed the status of substantial crises,” caused by the “presence in Britain of our huge army.” The GI newspaper Stars and Stripes underscored the ambassador’s role as an Anglo-American mediator when it published a cartoon showing a tipsy American soldier, surrounded by angry patrons in a pub after creating a disturbance, making a telephone call. The caption read: “Mr. Winant, please! Mr. John G. Winant …”

  When Bernard Bellush, a GI from New York, visited London on leave in 1944, virtually every British civilian he met told him how much they admired Winant and how “this caring and courageous envoy had strengthened their will and determination to fight Hitler.” Thanks to their fondness for Winant, Bellush added, the Britons he met went out of their way to “make American GIs like myself welcome.”

  Whenever he could break away from his work for an hour or two, Winant liked to go out on the streets of London to talk to GIs and find out how they were coping with their lives in Britain—”no airs, no brass hat–ism, just a swell guy,” in the words of one soldier. Sometimes, the ambassador would lend money to his young countrymen or buy them a beer at a nearby pub. Occasionally, as he did with his Ivy League friends early in the war, he would invite a few of them back to his office to continue the conversation, while other visitors with appointments waited impatiently outside. GIs who couldn’t find a bed at a hotel or Red Cross club were invited to spend the night on the floor of his flat.

  Winant urged the Americans he met to write and let him know how they were doing, and many did just that. Among his correspondents was a young OSS officer named Stewart Alsop, later a noted columnist and author, who told Winant he had fallen in love with an English girl and wanted to marry her. Her parents, however, were skeptical about the match, and Alsop, who was a distant cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, asked the ambassador if he would contact them and vouch for his character and family background. Winant, who had met Alsop through Mrs. Roosevelt, complied, permission was given, and the couple soon married.

  In his meetings with young Americans, Winant invariably encouraged them to get to know the British. While many GIs left the country without doing so, thousands of others did form close bonds with British civilians. For some, it began with regular outings at the local pub, where they soon got to know all the regulars. Writing about the pub he frequented in Watford, a town in Hertfordshire, Robert Arbib observed: “You hadn’t been at the Unicorn very long before you were one of the family, calling the boss Dora and the chief barman Jimmy, and being called ‘my Yank’ … and eventually, ‘Bob’ or ‘dear.’ ” Befriended by a number of townspeople he met there, Arbib “ate at their tables, slept on couches in their parlours, went to parties and dances with them … and made myself completely at home.”

  Americans stationed for long periods of time in one place, like the airmen of the Eighth Air Force, had a particularly good opportunity to get to know the residents of nearby villages and towns on a more personal basis. A woman who lived in an East Anglia village adjacent to a U.S. Army Air Forces base recalled: “By 1943, the GIs were part of our community. We knew the names of their planes. We knew the crews who flew them and the ground crews who serviced them.” When the planes returned from bombing runs in the afternoon, “we’d hear the thunder of their engines and would pause in our games or work,” praying that all the Yanks had come back safely.

  Other Americans, meanwhile, formed intimate friendships with British families who invited them to their homes for Sunday dinners and holiday celebrations or offered them permanent billets. Among them was Lieutenant Dick Winters, a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne. Shortly after Winters arrived for training near the Wiltshire village of Aldbourne, an elderly couple, whose RAF son had recently been killed in action, invited him to tea. He accepted, and, after a few more visits, the couple asked if he would like to board with them. Given permission by his superiors to do so, he became in effect their surrogate son. “They adopted me and made me part of the family,” said Winters, whose later distinguished combat career in Europe was highlighted in the Stephen Ambrose book and HBO miniseries, Band of Brothers. “I’d found a home away from home…. This helped me prepare mentally for what I was about to face.”

  That was apparently true for many other GIs as well. When U.S. military authorities examined the mail that American soldiers sent back from Normandy in July 1944, they discovered that more than a quarter of the letters were addressed to British homes.

  * Jackson, of course, added to that trouble himself by having an affair with Beatrice Eden.

  WHILE THE TIES BETWEEN BRITISH CIVILIANS AND AMERICAN GIs may have strengthened as the war advanced, the feeling of kinship between the two countries’ leaders ebbed dramatically. In the first two years of the Anglo-American alliance, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had conferred seven times. They had celebrated Christmas and other holidays in each other’s company. They had joked, fished, sung, and drunk together. As early as mid-1943, however, Roosevelt began to pull back from his comradeship with the British prime minister. Indeed, it sometimes appeared that he wanted as little to do with Churchill as possible. “In the last eighteen months of Roosevelt’s life, I thought the openheartedness diminished,” recalled John Colville. “The brotherly tone of the President’s messages seemed to change.”

  With the United States now dominant in the number of troops, weapons, and other resources devoted to the war, Churchill, to his considerable pain a
nd alarm, found himself and his country being treated as junior partners in the alliance. “Increasingly, as the war went on, the Americans paid no attention to anything we said, unless it happened to coincide with something that they wanted to do,” observed General Ian Jacob, Pug Ismay’s deputy. Eric Sevareid noted: “For many years [the British] had urged Americans to accept the facts of life and come into the world—and now the Americans … had done so, and in so doing had created a complete new set of life’s facts which the British had hardly expected and were beginning now bitterly to resent …. Englishmen were not only no longer the unique heroes of the fight, they were of secondary importance.”

  The fraying of the Roosevelt-Churchill relationship occurred at a critical period. With the tide of the war turning in the Allies’ favor, it was becoming obvious that Hitler’s defeat was only a matter of time. By the fall of 1943, the Germans were gone from North Africa, and the Battle of the Atlantic finally was won. Sicily had been captured, Mussolini overthrown, and Allied troops had begun to slog their way up the boot of Italy. On the eastern front, the Russians followed their victory at Stalingrad with a major offensive against the Germans, taking back much of the Soviet territory occupied by the Wehrmacht in 1941. Planning for the invasion of Europe intensified, and preliminary discussions began over surrender terms, the occupation of Germany, and Roosevelt’s cherished dream—a new world organization of nations to keep the peace. Among the Allies, the main concern was no longer national survival; it now was the protection of each country’s postwar interests.

  In response to the fast-moving military situation, Roosevelt and Churchill met twice in four months—in Washington in May 1943 and Quebec and Hyde Park in August. The fact that both conferences were again on Roosevelt’s home turf—or at least his home continent—was very much a sore point for Churchill, whose attempts to persuade the president to come to Britain for at least one wartime visit had thus far met with failure. According to Harry Hopkins, FDR was wary of traveling to Britain for “political reasons,” fearing he might be seen by American voters as too sympathetic to the British empire. In the eyes of the sixty-eight-year-old prime minister, who had endured a succession of long sea voyages and transatlantic flights to meet with Roosevelt, such a response was hardly gracious treatment of a loyal ally.

  But in the summer of 1943, Roosevelt and his military advisers were not in a mood to yield much of anything. Having been outmaneuvered by the British at earlier conferences, particularly at Casablanca, the American high command was determined to have its way on strategic operations until the war’s end. During the 1943 meetings, the British did win agreement for their proposal to invade Italy in September—a continuation of their Mediterranean strategy. But U.S. officials, increasingly exasperated by Churchill’s foot-dragging on a landing in France, insisted that the British must commit themselves to May 1, 1944, as a firm date for D-Day. Even Churchill’s old friend Harry Hopkins had turned against him on the issue. “Harry is sure that Winston’s obstinacy, his drawn-out struggle to postpone a second front in France, has in fact prolonged the war,” Lord Moran wrote in his diary. “It appears that the President and Hopkins are no longer prepared to acknowledge Winston as an infallible guide in military matters.” (In truth, they never did; they simply had become more outspoken about the fact.) Against Churchill’s strenuous opposition, the Americans also pushed through a plan to support the D-Day landings with an invasion of southern France.

  Distressed by U.S. resistance to his strategic ideas, the prime minister was wounded on a deeper level by the president’s growing coolness. Both politically and personally, he needed FDR far more than Roosevelt needed him. Churchill was warmer and considerably more emotional than Roosevelt, whom Arthur Schlesinger Jr. described as “glittering, impersonal … superficially warm, basically cold.” Missy LeHand, FDR’s private secretary, once told a reporter that her boss, on whom she doted, “was really incapable of a personal friendship with anyone.” Churchill, on the other hand, was “a gentleman to whom the personal element means a great deal,” as Eleanor Roosevelt noted. Churchill himself observed to Anthony Eden that “my whole system is founded on friendship with Roosevelt.” He later added: “Our friendship is the rock on which I build for the future of the world.” To Roosevelt, Churchill remarked: “Anything like a serious difference between you and me would break my heart.”

  In the early period of the pair’s relationship, there did seem to be an authentic personal closeness, a “real friendship and understanding” between the two, as Daisy Suckley, a distant cousin and sometime confidante of the president’s, put it. After watching Roosevelt and Churchill together in Washington in June 1942, Suckley noted that FDR’s “manner was easy and intimate—His face humorous or very serious, according to the subject of conversation, and entirely natural. Not a trace of having to guard his words or expression, just the opposite of his manner at a press conference, when he is an actor on a stage.” As for Churchill, Suckley took away the impression that he “adores the President … looks up to him, defers to him.”

  But even in those halcyon days of the relationship, there was an unspoken rivalry between these two leaders, which only increased as the war approached its climax. “Roosevelt envied Churchill’s genius, and Churchill increasingly envied Roosevelt’s power,” the historian John Grigg has written. Samuel Rosenman, one of FDR’s top speechwriters, observed that the president “was prone to jealousy of competitors in his field. He liked flattery, especially as he grew older, and he seemed frequently to be jealous of compliments paid to others for political sagacity, eloquence, statesmanship or accomplishments in public life.”

  Many years later, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. asked Pamela Churchill Harriman whether she thought Roosevelt and Churchill would ever have become friends if there had been no war. Her answer was an emphatic no. “They had nothing in common,” she said. “They were not each other’s type. They were not amused by the same things. They did not like the same sort of people…. They had a different attitude toward the past…. But they had to get on with each other, and both worked at it.”

  The truth was that, for all Churchill’s romanticizing in his memoirs about his relationship with Roosevelt, neither he nor the president ever allowed their friendship to interfere with what they considered the national interests of their respective countries. In the words of the historian David K. Adams, “Each used the other, each exploited the other and drove hard bargains when interests conflicted. Out of their creative tension, great good came and heroic myths were created.”

  THE CONFLICTS BETWEEN Roosevelt and Churchill extended far beyond the question of when and where Allied forces should land in Europe. An adamant opponent of Britain’s empire, Roosevelt spent much of the war trying to pressure Churchill and his government to begin the process of granting independence to their country’s imperial possessions. Even before the United States entered the war, the president made his position clear, telling his son Elliott: “We’ve got to make clear to the British from the very outset that we don’t intend to be simply a good-time Charlie who can be used to help the British empire out of a tight spot…. I think I speak as America’s President when I say that America won’t help England in this war simply so that she will be able to continue to ride roughshod over colonial peoples.”

  During Churchill’s first visit to Washington, Roosevelt raised the issue of self-determination for India, the most precious jewel in the British empire’s crown. Churchill reacted so negatively, he later wrote, that the president never brought up the subject again. That was not exactly the case. In future meetings and in his correspondence with the prime minister, FDR repeatedly raised the question of India and of British imperialism in general. Elliott Roosevelt, for example, remembered that at Casablanca, his father “dropped in a remark about the past relationship between French and British financiers, [who] combined into … syndicates for the purpose of dredging riches out of colonies.”

  The president’s antipathy toward British col
onialism was echoed in an October 12, 1942, Life editorial entitled “An Open Letter to the People of England.” In it, the magazine’s editors declared: “One thing we are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British Empire together. We don’t like to put the matter so bluntly, but we don’t want you to have any illusions.” The editorial urged the British to forgo “your side of the war,” which meant colonialism, and join “our side,” which translated into “fighting for freedom throughout the world.”

  For Henry Luce, the publishing mogul who owned Life, Time, and Fortune, the twentieth century was destined to be the “American Century.” Of Luce, a bemused Tom Matthews, who worked for him as Time’s managing editor, said: “If he had been British, he would certainly have been an extreme Tory, proud of the Empire, protestingly furious at its liquidation. As an American with an imperial sense of America’s future, he was glad to see Britain’s competition dwindle.”

  Infuriated by the Life editorial, Churchill declared in a London speech that he had “not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Throughout the war, he manfully did his best to follow Roosevelt’s wishes, except when it came to the empire, which was a deeply personal, emotional issue for him. In the 1930s, he had led a lengthy, vitriolic campaign against a British government proposal for limited self-government for India. His attitude was regarded by most MPs as reactionary and unrealistic, and it was responsible in part for his exclusion from any high posts in the governments of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. Churchill’s views on India also prevented him from attracting a large following in the House of Commons when he first began warning about the growing menace of a rearmed Germany.