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

by Lynne Olson

  ON THE NIGHT OF APRIL 11, 1945, ED MURROW WAS MORE CHEERFUL than he’d been in a long time. He had finally escaped the leash of London and was now with George Patton’s forces deep inside Germany. Hitler’s Reich was collapsing, and the war was fast drawing to a close. And Murrow, who loved playing poker but never had much luck at it, had just won thousands of dollars in an “uproarious” game with some of the other correspondents covering Patton’s Third Army.

  The next morning, he stuffed his winnings into a money belt and set off with U.S. troops toward the city of Weimar. Passing well-fed farmers plowing their fields, the Americans came to a hill a few miles outside the city. At the top was a concentration camp, enclosed by barbed wire, whose German guards had fled three days before. The camp’s name was Buchenwald.

  When Murrow and the other Americans stepped through its main gate, the broadcaster felt as if he’d been sucker-punched. Dozens of emaciated men, most of them little more than skeletal wraiths, flocked around him. “Men and boys reached out to touch me,” he said in a broadcast a few days later. “They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death had already marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes.” To his shock, he realized he had met several of them before the war, including a former mayor of Prague, an eminent professor from Poland, a doctor from Vienna. As Murrow stood there, a man fell dead in front of him. “Two others—they must have been over sixty—were crawling toward the latrine. I saw it—but will not describe it.” Murrow took notes of what the prisoners told him: six thousand men dead in March, two hundred “on the day we got here—& people outside are so well fed.”

  As several of the inmates escorted him through the camp, he felt, he later said, like vomiting. In a small courtyard, he found “two rows of bodies stacked like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised…. I tried to count them as best I could and arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than 500 men and boys lay there in two neat piles.” More than once during his few hours at Buchenwald, Murrow broke down in tears. He took his winnings of the night before from his money belt and distributed it all to the camp’s occupants.

  Although Buchenwald technically was not an extermination camp, more than fifty thousand of its inmates died during the war, most of starvation and disease. The true Nazi death camps, most of them in Poland, were liberated by Russian troops at about the same time as Buchenwald. Early in the war, Murrow and his CBS team, along with other American and British news organizations, had brought to public attention several reports about the Nazis’ mass slaughter of Jews in those extermination camps. But for the remainder of the conflict, journalists from Allied countries provided little further coverage of the continuing persecution of the Jews and other enemies of the Reich. For Western news organizations, the Holocaust was not a major wartime story; its full extent was not known until after the conflict ended. Absent undeniable proof of such mass killings, it was virtually impossible for those living in democratic countries to comprehend the scale and savagery of the German attempt to wipe out the Jewish population of Europe.

  Certainly, the U.S. and British governments, which had access to more information about the Holocaust than their citizens, did little to make the public aware of the atrocities or to take any substantive action to save the Jews. A number of officials in both countries, including Gil Winant and Henry Morgenthau, pushed their leaders to do more, but with sparse results. Insisting that the only way to help the Jews was to win the war, the Roosevelt administration declined to press for a change in America’s restrictive immigration laws so that more Jews could be admitted to the country. In 1944, Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board to help facilitate the rescue of Jews from occupied nations, but the last-minute attempt was, as a number of historians have pointed out, much too little, much too late.

  After returning to London from Buchenwald, Murrow was determined to open the eyes of his audience to the bestiality he had just witnessed. “What he had seen, he wanted the world to know,” said BBC broadcaster Geoffrey Bridson, a friend of Murrow’s. He was aiming, Bridson said, at “the starry-eyed listener who thought, ‘Oh, well, that’s a long way away, doesn’t really have anything to do with us.’ Well, Ed was just in a mood to kick them right in the teeth.”

  Three days after leaving Germany, Murrow sat down at the microphone and, in a voice suffused with anger, described what he had seen at the camp—the stacked bodies, the living skeletons, the torture chambers, the piles of shoes, hair, and gold teeth. At the end of his broadcast, he said flatly: “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words…. If I’ve offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald—I’m not in the least sorry.” Bridson, who was in the studio during the broadcast, said that Murrow “was shaking with rage by the time he finished.”

  Many people thought it was the best broadcast he had ever made, but Murrow disagreed. He felt he had not done full justice to the horror he had seen. “One shoe, two shoes, a dozen shoes, yes,” he said. “But how can you describe several thousand shoes?”

  ON APRIL 12, the day Murrow visited Buchenwald, Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. The news of his death sparked an outpouring of shock and grief throughout the world, but few people were more affected than Gil Winant. Barely recovered from a severe bout of the flu, he was shattered by the news, which reached him in the middle of the night and left him literally prostrate for hours.

  Despite his frustrations with a number of FDR’s policies and the president’s occasional offhand treatment of him, Winant never wavered in his support and fondness for the leader who had been his friend and close ally for more than a decade. “I’m Roosevelt’s man,” he once said. “If Roosevelt wants me to do anything, I’ll do it. That’s my political future.” In a telegram to the president several years before, Winant said simply: “Thank God for you.” In another, he remarked: “I always think of you and miss seeing you very much.” Just a few months earlier, he had scoured London antique shops for the perfect Christmas gift to send to Roosevelt, eventually settling on a walking stick that George Washington had presented to Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon’s younger brother.

  In turn, Roosevelt had frequently expressed admiration and affection for the shy idealist who had sacrificed his political career for him and the New Deal. On several occasions, he talked about appointing Winant to top cabinet positions, including secretary of state. In 1944, he gave some thought to choosing Winant as his vice presidential running mate, floating the ambassador’s name to a number of his closest associates, including Henry Morgenthau and Harold Ickes. Mentioning the possibility of Winant’s candidacy at a meeting with his aides, FDR noted that the ambassador “could make the rottenest speech and yet when he finished, give the impression he was Abraham Lincoln.” Nobody but Roosevelt was enthusiastic about the idea, however, and the president chose Harry Truman instead.

  Like Winant, Winston Churchill was staggered by the report of FDR’s death; it struck him, he later said, like a physical blow. At three in the morning on April 13, he summoned Walter Thompson, his principal bodyguard, to his study, where, as Thompson recalled, he talked about Roosevelt—“weeping, reminiscing, smiling, going over the days, the years; recalling conversations; wishing he had done this … agreeing, disagreeing, reliving.” To Thompson, Churchill declared: “He was a great friend to us all. He gave us immeasurable help…. Without him and the Americans behind him, surely we would have been smothered.”

  The British people shared their prime minister’s grief. Most of them knew little about the conflicts roiling the Anglo-American alliance; to them, Roosevelt was simply the savior of their nation. “This country,” said the Daily Telegraph, “owes him a debt which can never be repaid for his understanding, help and confidence in its darkest hours.” The day after FDR died, flags in London fluttered at half-staff, the king and his c
ourt declared seven days of mourning, and the usually bustling area around Piccadilly Circus was as “quiet as a small back street.” Londoners “stood in the streets staring blankly at the first incredible newspaper headlines [and] queued up patiently for succeeding editions,” Mollie Panter-Downes noted in The New Yorker. A U.S. Army clerk recalled “being stopped on the street by at least a dozen people who expressed sympathy to me as if [the president] had been one of my own family.” The writer C. P. Snow observed: “I don’t think I have ever seen London quite so devastated by an event. Even my old landlady was crying. The Underground was full of tearful faces—far more than if Winston had died, I’m sure.”

  On April 18, more than three thousand people, including the British king and queen and several exiled European monarchs, jammed St. Paul’s Cathedral for a memorial service for Roosevelt, while thousands more listened to the service outside. Winant, who escorted a weeping Churchill, read the lesson, taken from the Book of Revelation. Later that day, Churchill would declare to the House of Commons that Roosevelt “was the greatest American friend we have ever known and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the new world to the old.”

  Churchill’s reaction to the president’s death was far more complex, however, than his eloquent eulogy revealed. There was no doubt he was deeply saddened, but the sadness warred with the anger and hurt he still felt over what he regarded as FDR’s slighting treatment of him and Britain in the previous year and a half. The day after FDR’s death, he dithered over the question of whether to fly to Washington for the president’s funeral. Lord Halifax cabled him that Harry Hopkins thought he should come, that his visit would have “an immense effect for good.” Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, also urged the trip, telling the prime minister “how greatly he would personally value the opportunity” of meeting him.

  Nonetheless, in the end, Churchill chose not to go, claiming he had too much work to do in London. His decision puzzled many of his associates, who noted that he never before had hesitated to travel to Washington when he felt the need. As Max Hastings has written, “It is difficult not to regard the prime minister’s absence from Roosevelt’s funeral as a reflection of the alienation between himself and the president, which grew grave indeed in the last months of Roosevelt’s life.” Churchill’s decision could also be explained by the fact that Roosevelt had never visited him in London, despite repeated invitations. Further, he always had been the suitor, the one to press for the Anglo-American meetings. Now, Churchill apparently felt, the shoe should be on the other foot. “I think that it would be a good thing that President Truman should come over here,” he wrote to the king.

  Truman, however, never visited London while Churchill was prime minister.

  THE SPRING OF 1945 spawned a whirlwind of events: the discovery of the true extent of the Holocaust, Roosevelt’s death, and the fall of German cities and towns, one after the other, like plums into the Allies’ lap. In late April, Allied armies hurtled across the Reich, the Americans and British from the west, the Russians from the east. On April 25, U.S. and Soviet advance units met at the Elbe River, as Eisenhower had planned. On April 30, Hitler committed suicide, with Soviet troops less than a mile away from his bunker. On May 7, the war in Europe was over. At 2:41 that morning, General Alfred Jodl, the chief of operations of the German armed forces, signed his country’s formal declaration of surrender at SHAEF headquarters, a drab redbrick schoolhouse in the French city of Reims. “With this signing,” Jodl told General Walter Bedell Smith, “the German people and the German forces are, for better or worse, delivered into the victor’s hands.”

  The following day in London, hundreds of thousands of people jammed Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, the streets surrounding Parliament and Whitehall, and the parks around Buckingham Palace, awaiting the official announcement of the war’s end. It was a glorious spring day, and the joyful, exuberant crowds reveled in the warm sun. It seemed, one Londoner observed, as if the city had been “taken over by an enormous family picnic.” Mothers adorned their babies’ hair with red, white, and blue ribbons, and dogs sported red, white, and blue bows. Soldiers kissed laughing young women as they strolled by. One GI, his face covered with lipstick smudges, called out to the women who passed him: “Won’t you join my collection?” In Piccadilly, American sailors formed a conga line, with everyone around them joining in. Church bells pealed. From tugboats on the Thames horns blared in celebration.

  Broadcasting live from a van in the center of London, Ed Murrow described for his listeners the sight of thousands of people streaming out of flats and offices to join the merrymaking. He was one of the few Americans in the city who had been there from the beginning of the war and had seen it through to the end. To a certain extent, he must have been talking about himself when he noted in his broadcast that, notwithstanding the jubilation, many Londoners were not inclined to do much celebrating that day. “Their minds,” he said, “must be filled with memories of friends who’ve died in the streets or on the battlefields. Six years is a long time. I’ve observed today that people have very little to say. There are no words.”

  That evening, Murrow returned to his Regent’s Park neighborhood to summon up his own memories of the war. On one corner, he remarked, his best friend, BBC editor Alan Wells, had been killed. Passing a water tank, he recalled “almost with a start, that there used to be a pub there, hit with a two-thousand pounder one night, thirty people killed.” He admitted he was having trouble coming to grips with the idea of peace: “Trying to realize what has happened, one’s mind takes refuge in the past. The war that was seems more real than the peace that has come.”

  FOR GIL WINANT, the war was not yet over. He spent a quiet V-E Day with friends, reminiscing about Roosevelt and what the day would have meant to him—but, most of all, caught up in worry over the fate of his elder son. A month before the war ended, the ambassador received word that John Winant and the other VIP prisoners of war held by the Germans as hostages had been removed from Colditz by the Gestapo just hours before American troops liberated the prison. What Winant did not know was that, with Germany plummeting into chaos, SS head Heinrich Himmler had ordered the Allied hostages to be taken to the Black Forest and shot. “When the whole German people are weeping,” Himmler declared, “the English royal family should not be laughing.”

  But the general assigned to oversee the executions played for time, knowing full well what the victorious Allies would do to him if he carried out the order. When the high command in Berlin entrusted the assignment to another officer, the general contacted Swiss officials, who arranged for the POWs’ transfer to an American command post in Austria. Two days after V-E Day, Gil Winant got the call he had hoped for but feared he would never receive: John was safe and on his way back to London. After hearing the news, Lord Beaverbrook wrote the ambassador: “That your anxiety for him should have been removed in the hour of triumph to which you have so greatly contributed, will be cause for rejoicing among all your friends in this country. And that means the whole British people.”

  FOR WINSTON CHURCHILL, meanwhile, V-E Day was a bittersweet moment. Vast crowds cheered him as he drove to Buckingham Palace, then to Parliament, to announce the German surrender. He rejoiced in the victory, but later that night, in a speech broadcast throughout Britain, he alluded to the fate of Poland and other Soviet-dominated countries when he said: “On the continent of Europe, we have yet to make sure that the simple and honorable purposes for which we entered the war are not brushed aside … and that the words ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy’ and ‘liberation’ are not distorted from their true meaning.”

  Four days earlier, in a telegram to his wife, Churchill admitted to a profound discouragement in the face of the “poisonous politics and deadly international rivalries” underlying the Allied triumph. The idealism of the conflict’s early years, with its hopes and dreams of greater freedom, justice, and equality in the world, had dissolved in a welter of wartime deal
s and misunderstandings. Immediately ahead lay the nuclear infernos at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surrender of Japan, and the beginning of the Cold War.

  AT REIMS, Dwight D. Eisenhower celebrated V-E Day by hosting a luncheon for twenty-five top British and American officers on his SHAEF staff, most of whom had formed close bonds with one another over the previous year and a half. It was a joyful, high-spirited occasion—at least until the end. “By the time [it] was over and everybody began to tell everybody goodbye, all of a sudden this group of generals recognized they no longer had a job,” one of the participants recalled. “The companionship of months and days was gone. And it was almost like having attended your own funeral…. By the time we left everybody was sad, and General Eisenhower was saying goodbye with tears in his eyes.”

  A month later, the citizens of London paid tribute to Eisenhower for his inestimable role in guiding Allied forces to victory. In an elaborate ceremony at the bomb-damaged Guildhall, the American general was presented with the Honorary Freedom of the City of London, an honor dating back to medieval days and the highest the city can bestow. Virtually everyone of note in London was there—leaders of Parliament, top figures in business and the law, the British military brass, members of the cabinet, and Winston Churchill. One by one, they paraded up the aisle of the Guildhall’s Great Hall to be received by the lord mayor and sheriffs in their ceremonial robes. Near the end of the procession came Gil Winant. “There had been applause in various degrees for the others,” noted an American official, but when Winant’s name was announced, “there was a storm surpassed only by the greetings to the Prime Minister and [Eisenhower] himself.”

  In the glow of victory, the earlier animus of the British military toward Eisenhower seemed to have drained away. Even Alan Brooke became an admirer—at least for the day. “Ike made a wonderful speech and impressed all hearers in the Guildhall,” Brooke noted in his diary. “He then made an equally good speech of a different kind outside the Mansion House, and a first-class speech at the Mansion House lunch. I had never realized that Ike was as big a man until I heard his performance today!”