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

by Lynne Olson

  IN BRITAIN, HOWEVER, victory’s glow faded quickly. Shortly after V-E Day, the Labour Party announced it was leaving Churchill’s coalition government, prompting the prime minister to call for the country’s first general election since 1935. Most people expected Churchill and the Conservative Party to triumph, but Winant was not among them. Months before the election, the ambassador told Churchill’s doctor that he “was worried about Winston, who had become so engrossed in the war that he had lost touch with the feeling in the country.” When the votes were tallied on July 26, he was proved to be right. The leader who had been so inspirational in wartime was turned out of office by weary, war-sick voters who decided they preferred the Labour Party to manage their crippled economy and transform their society. “Though [the British people] are grateful to Churchill for winning the war,” Pamela Churchill wrote to Averell Harriman, “they don’t mean to be sentimental about it.”

  Radicalized by the war, the people of Britain expected—and demanded—that the enormous sacrifices they had made over the past six years be repaid by significant social and economic postwar reforms. Churchill continued to be bewildered by such demands. As he campaigned for reelection, “he scoffs at those foolish people who want to rebuild the world,” Lord Moran noted, “but beneath this bluster he is, I believe, less certain about things. He has a feeling that he is back in the thirties, alone in the world, speaking a foreign tongue.” Physically and emotionally exhausted, Churchill told Moran shortly before what he called “this damned election” that “I have no message for [the people] now.” He added wistfully: “I feel very lonely without a war.” Nonetheless, he was convinced he would win. The Conservatives’ landslide defeat—”a complete debacle,” said John Colville—was a shock not only to the prime minister and his countrymen but to the rest of the world as well. It was, declared the New York Times, “one of the most stunning election surprises in the history of democracy.”

  Churchill was devastated by the loss. Pug Ismay, who saw him shortly after the results were announced, said he appeared “mortally wounded.” Stricken by the suddenness of his downfall, he told Ismay: “I have no automobile, no place to live.” In a matter of hours, his entire life had been turned upside down. “The whole focus of power, action and news,” Mary Churchill noted, “had been transferred (with lightning speed, as it always is) to the new Prime Minister”—Clement Attlee. At 10 Downing Street, “the Map Room was deserted, the Private Office empty, there were no official telegrams.”

  A few days after he was turned out of office, Churchill spent a final weekend at Chequers, the scene of so many lively, historic wartime gatherings. He and Clementine invited just a few people to join them—their children, several of Churchill’s closest advisers, and Winant. He and Churchill had had their difficulties over the last four years, especially in the war’s final months, when the U.S. government increasingly flexed its muscle as the alliance’s dominant partner. But all that was ancient history now, and the Churchills made clear they still regarded the ambassador as family.

  During that somber weekend, Winant and the others did everything they could to cheer up the disconsolate former prime minister. “It was not so much the loss of power that he minded, but the sudden loss of a job to do,” Sarah Churchill later remarked. “Six years geared to the utmost mental as well as physical exertion, and suddenly nothing.” Above all, he missed the red dispatch boxes, filled with urgent papers, that arrived several times a day from Downing Street. According to Sarah, “they had become so much a part of his life.”

  The night before they left Chequers, Winant, Sarah, and the other guests signed the mansion’s guestbook. For Churchill, it had always been an important ritual. Once, when Eisenhower left Chequers without signing the book, the prime minister’s butler hurried after him, solemnly noting, “Sir, you have forgotten the book.” The tone of the servant’s voice made clear “he found it difficult to forgive my oversight,” Eisenhower wrote. That final night, the last to sign was Churchill. He inscribed his name, then added one word under his signature: “Finis.”

  BY THE AUTUMN OF 1945, THE COLOR, VIBRANCY, AND BUSTLE THAT characterized wartime London had receded into the mists of memory. Londoners could now cross Piccadilly without risking life and limb, hotel rooms were plentiful, and European exiles had largely disappeared from the restaurants of Soho. The French and Belgians had left the year before, after the liberation of their countries. The Dutch, Norwegians, and Czechoslovaks followed suit in the spring, while the unhappy Poles resigned themselves to lives of permanent exile—in England and elsewhere.

  The Americans, meanwhile, had vacated most of the buildings they had occupied around Grosvenor Square. Also closing their doors were Rainbow Corner and other GI clubs. On October 15, the final London edition of Stars and Stripes appeared, with the banner headline—“GOODBYE, ENGLAND”—emblazoned across the front page. In an accompanying story, Clement Attlee wished good luck to the departing Americans. “Now, with the immense tasks of war brought to a glorious conclusion,” the prime minister said, “we look forward to continuing an ever-growing friendship with the United States in the achievements of peace.”

  In reality, however, that friendship was already unraveling. Eight days after the surrender of Japan, Harry Truman, FDR’s successor, canceled Lend-Lease food shipments to Britain without any warning to the British government. In Washington, the British mission coordinating the dispatch of food supplies from the United States learned of the decision only when one of its ships was refused permission to sail. For battered, impoverished Britain, Truman’s action could hardly have come at a worse time.

  In the fall of 1945, British food supplies sank to their lowest level in six years. Instead of ending when the war was over, food rationing in the country became considerably more stringent. The ration for bacon was cut 25 percent just a few days after victory over Japan was declared, and the queues for bread, potatoes, and other vegetables often stretched a block or more. (Bread and potatoes would be rationed, too, within a short time.) A returning British soldier expressed shock at the conditions he found in London: “It is hard to realize that I am in the capital of a victorious nation. There is no thought of triumph. The chief thought among Londoners is food.”

  Also in short supply were clothes and housing. Even the king felt the clothing pinch, exclaiming to Attlee: “We must all have new clothes—my family is down to the lowest ebb.” But, with stringent clothes rationing still in place, the monarch’s plea went unanswered. Meanwhile, the loss of more than 40 percent of the country’s housing stock left millions of Britons without permanent homes. Temporary housing—wooden and corrugated iron structures erected on bomb sites—had transformed some areas of London and other British cities into shantytowns.

  Having lost a quarter of its wealth and two thirds of its export trade, the country, after six years of war, was virtually bankrupt. Its people had very little to look forward to. With the conflict over and the danger gone, the community spirit that marked the war years had vanished. Why, Britons asked, must they continue to scrimp, save, and sacrifice? There were bitter complaints about shortages and rationing and considerable fear about what the future might hold.

  As it turned out, such fears were abundantly justified. The new Labour government began laying the groundwork for the welfare state envisaged by the 1942 Beveridge Report, but it lacked the resources to properly fund the state’s new benefits. For the next several years, most of the goods that Britain produced would be for export, to resuscitate its economy and generate the revenue that the country so desperately needed. Rationing of food and clothing would continue into the 1950s, and the housing shortage would grow even more severe. Many British cities would remain dingy and dilapidated for years.

  By contrast, the United States and its economy experienced virtually no trouble in making the transition from war to peace. It had ended the war with the lowest casualty rate of any major combatant country and no serious damage within its boundaries. Unlike Britain
, whose industry had been devoted almost entirely to wartime production, the United States had continued to churn out a variety of consumer goods throughout the conflict. As a result, it was in the enviable postwar position not only of continuing to provide those goods to its own people but also to supply the world’s export markets, including many that had formerly relied on Britain for exports.

  For most Americans, the strains of war faded away almost as soon as peace was declared. “The American people are in the pleasant predicament of having to live 50 per cent better than they have ever lived before,” said Fred Vinson, director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion in Washington. New cars began appearing in dealers’ showrooms, gasoline was plentiful once more, and refrigerators, washing machines, and other big-ticket consumer items became widely available. The pent-up demand for such goods, combined with the massive personal savings accumulated by Americans during the war, helped create an economic boom that lasted for almost a generation.

  Donald Worby, a GI just returned from Europe, discovered how good the war had been for some of his countrymen when he picked up a loaf of bread one day at a bakery in his hometown. Worby, who had spent considerable time in England and admired its people for their stoicism in the face of hardship, overheard one customer tell another how sorry she was that the war was over. If it had lasted just a little longer, she explained, she and her husband could have earned enough money to pay off the loans on four buildings they had bought with their earlier wartime savings. The other woman, who had lost a son in the war, picked up a cream pie from the counter and hurled it into the budding landlady’s face. Taking a wad of bills from his pocket, Worby insisted on paying for the pie.

  Shocked by America’s sudden termination of Lend-Lease, the British could not understand how their closest wartime ally, flush with economic prosperity, could turn its back so abruptly on them and their woes. One woman, expressing a view shared by many of her countrymen, declared of the Americans: “I think they’re behaving disgustingly.” Having put their faith in a 1944 verbal commitment by Roosevelt that Lend-Lease would continue for awhile after Germany’s defeat, British leaders had clung to the belief that America would help ease their country’s difficult postwar economic recovery. Truman, however, knew nothing of his predecessor’s promises, which were never written down, nor was he aware of the magnitude of Britain’s financial plight. What he did know was that most members of Congress, who had grudgingly approved the Lend-Lease program as a wartime measure only, wanted it ended as quickly as possible. “We’d given our allies everything they asked for and more,” said one congressman, “and now people were sick and tired of it, and didn’t want to hear any more about it.” A few months before his death, Roosevelt had predicted the resurgence of such an insular mood. “Anybody who thinks that isolationism is dead in this country is crazy,” he told Robert Sherwood. “As soon as this war is over, it may well be stronger than ever.”

  Eventually, after long and acrimonious negotiations, the United States agreed to help bail Britain out of its financial crisis with a $3.5 billion loan, to be paid off over fifty years, and generous repayment terms for the Lend-Lease aid already provided. Of the $21 billion in Lend-Lease debts owed the United States, the British were asked to give back only $650 million. But the bailout came with a steep—and, in Britain’s view, deeply unfair—price: British endorsement of a 1944 plan hammered out at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, creating a new international economic order that would make the dollar the world’s leading currency, eliminate Britain’s imperial preference system, and greatly benefit U.S. trade in general.

  The British were indignant that the United States would demand interest payments for a new loan, no matter how lenient the terms, and otherwise take advantage of the extremely perilous economic situation in which the country now found itself. “It is aggravating to find that the reward for losing a quarter of our national wealth in the common cause is to pay tribute for half a century to those who have been enriched by the war,” The Economist declared.* In a vitriolic debate in the House of Commons, MPs blasted the loan’s provisions as a sellout of the British empire and an “economic Munich.” Some 100 members voted against accepting the bailout on such terms and 169 members, including Winston Churchill, abstained.

  Despite his own previous clashes with the British over economic and trade policy, among other issues, Harry Hopkins agreed with the Attlee government that America’s loan terms were onerous and misguided. “The American people must realize the plain and simple truth that the British live by trade,” Hopkins jotted down in a series of private notes. “We are probably powerful enough, if we want to use that power, to seriously injure that trade, but I do not believe it is to our self interest to do it. Why should we deliberately set about to make a weak Great Britain in the next hundred years? … We cannot afford to indulge in a deliberate program on either side which is going to force our two peoples further and further apart.”

  Furthermore, Hopkins wrote in his notes, America had a moral debt of its own to Britain. “I believe that the British have saved our skins twice—once in 1914 and again in 1940. They, with the French, took the brunt of the attack in the First World War, and the Germans came within a hair’s breadth of licking them both before we got into it. This time, it was Britain alone that held the fort, and they held that fort for us just as much for themselves, because we would not have had a chance to have licked Hitler had Britain fallen.”

  GIL WINANT AND his subordinates at the American embassy in London were as appalled as Hopkins by the abrupt cutoff of Lend-Lease and by the continued U.S. determination to link British aid to concessions in commercial and trade policy. Having tried without success to arrange a gradual end to Lend-Lease that was as orderly and pain-free as possible, Winant warned the Truman administration that its unilateral action “would work great hardship on the British people.” Wallace Carroll fumed: “Did any nation ever before sacrifice so heedlessly a colossal investment in that priceless commodity—good will?”

  If Roosevelt had been alive, said Ernest Penrose, Winant’s economic adviser, the ambassador “would have made one of the direct and vigorous appeals to him which in the preceding four years he had reserved for matters of the greatest urgency.” But Winant did not know the new president, and, according to his secretary, the Truman administration was “alien to him.” Nonetheless, he made an effort to reach out to Truman, sending him a cable shortly after he became president, saying: “I want to do everything in my power to assist you.”

  Truman and his lieutenants, however, showed little interest in Winant and his views and scant appreciation for what he had done to forge the Anglo-American alliance and keep it together. All that was in the past. The future, they believed, was the Cold War now developing between the West and Soviet Union. In their view, Winant’s dream of international social and economic justice was passé. What was needed now was “not idealism but realism, not persuasion but coercion, not softness but hardness.”

  At that point, Winant’s own future seemed as bleak as the outlook for Britain. Late in the war, he had lobbied to become the first secretary-general of the United Nations, and Roosevelt assured him he would do everything in his power to help him get the job. But FDR’s death helped end that dream, as did the decision to put the United Nations headquarters in New York, making it politically impossible for an American to head the organization. Yet, even in the face of such impossible odds, Winant kept hoping that, somehow, he would get the post. “His nerves during those months were all on edge,” a subordinate recalled. When he was finally informed he would not be given the job, he told an assistant: “I’ve lost the last thing I’ve really wanted.” He remained ambassador to Britain for nine months after the war, dealing with such mundane postwar details as arranging to send GI war brides across the Atlantic. Depressed and exhausted, he exclaimed to his secretary, “I have no life!”

  One of Winant’s only sources of comfort was Sarah Churchill, but, even there, happi
ness eluded him. The end of the war had brought their relationship to a crisis point. She filed for divorce from Vic Oliver, and Winant, who told her he also planned to get a divorce, wanted her to marry him. But having married at the age of twenty, she was unwilling to give up her newly regained independence.

  Like Winant, Sarah and her family had gone through an exceedingly difficult emotional time once the war was over. Both her parents had considerable trouble adjusting to life away from Downing Street and the end of wartime’s adrenaline rush. “I cannot explain how it is,” Clementine wrote to her daughter Mary, “but in our misery we seem, instead of clinging to each other, to be always having scenes. I’m sure it’s all my fault, but I’m finding life more than I can bear. He is so unhappy & that makes him very difficult.” As she had done so often in the past, Sarah played peacemaker between her mother and father, trying to cheer each of them up and repair the rift between them. Sarah, her mother wrote during the war, “has been and is a pillar of strength…. Everybody loves her. She has taken so much trouble with everybody to smooth out any little crossnesses and difficulties which might have arisen…. She looks after everybody.”

  Soon after Churchill was turned out of office, he took Sarah with him on a painting holiday to Italy’s Lake Como. “I do not know that I ever loved him more than in the months that followed [his defeat],” she later wrote. “I burst into pent-up tears when I heard I was to accompany him to Lake Como.” Shortly after they arrived, Sarah wrote to Clementine: “I wish you were here with us…. We never see a lovely sight that he doesn’t say, ‘I wish your mother were here.’ ” She added: “I really think he is settling down—he said last night—‘I’ve had a happy day’! I haven’t heard that for I don’t know how long!” As Churchill made clear in his own letter to Clementine, one reason for his happiness was the presence of his favorite daughter: “Sarah has been a joy. She is so thoughtful, tactful, amusing, and gay. The stay here would have been wrecked without her.” Father and daughter were closer than ever before, thanks in large part to Sarah’s stints as unofficial aide to Churchill at Tehran and Yalta. He was the most important man in her life, and she loved being with him. Yet, determined to hold on to her independence, she was wary as ever of falling too much under his spell.