It was at Walton-on-Thames that I first indulged my fantasy of becoming a priest, which for a young Catholic girl was certainly a sign of ambition. Each night, I prayed to the Virgin Mary, fashioning a bedroom altar complete with candles and a silver cup that I used to douse the flames. Whether it was the smell of burning wax or the prayerful rhythm of the words that most appealed, I am unsure, but the religious experience was more meaningful to me than to my parents, particularly my father, who rarely attended services and—when he did—complained about the requests for money.
Looking back, I do not know what went through the minds of my mother and father as they worried about what might be happening back home. I do know that they did all they could to make life for Kathy and me seem as normal as possible. We went on family outings, including to the beach, where we swam, ignoring the huge barriers that were there to keep the Germans from invading. On weekday afternoons, I sometimes slipped between the hedge branches to share high tea with our English neighbors. On Sundays my parents often hosted a gathering of Czechoslovak friends. After dinner the women cleared the tables while the men—most of whom were in the Beneš government—paced up and down alongside our garden in earnest discussion. They walked with their hands clasped behind their backs, as European men do, my father usually with his pipe and a puff of smoke around his head. In the evening the men drank beer, filled ashtrays with cigarettes, and played Mariáš, a distinctive Czech and Slovak card game with thirty-two cards divided into four suits (hearts, bells, leaves, and acorns) and rules more complicated than those of bridge. The wives drank coffee, traded news, and laughed.
IN THE SPRING of 1944, I had my first look at American troops. There were many of them roaming about the city streets, where they were besieged by children seeking handouts of candy and asking, “Got any gum, chum?” Others could be seen on the country roads, casually driving their camouflaged jeeps, trucks, and peculiar-looking amphibious vehicles known as ducks. Even the enlisted Americans had well-cut uniforms the color of a green olive, and, in contrast to those of the British, their guns were shiny and new. For a time, “Yanks” were everywhere; then, in an eyeblink, they were gone.
On the morning of June 6, Operation Overlord, the largest amphibious landing in the history of war, took place on five beachheads along a fifty-mile stretch of the Normandy coast. Despite a cold northwest wind, 160,000 troops crossed the Channel. The skies were thick with 11,000 airplanes, and there were so many ships and boats that it seemed almost possible to walk from England to France. The early-afternoon news confirmed that D-Day had arrived. Announcers, delighted to have such an event to discuss, told the exciting story of how the men and equipment had been assembled, the guns and ammunition packed, and the critical element of surprise maintained. The local French population had been warned only an hour ahead of time to evacuate the area; a devastating bombardment of roads, rails, and bridges was under way. An evening broadcast featured the king’s speech, followed by a prayer service led by the archbishop of Canterbury. By nightfall, 9,000 Allied fighters had given their lives. In succeeding weeks, soldiers continued to swarm into France, penetrating more deeply every day; the decisive struggle to reclaim Europe had begun.
WE HAD LIVED in Walton-on-Thames for more than a year. The blackout was still on, but we didn’t worry much about bombs anymore. After D-Day the Germans were on the run—or so we thought.
On June 13, at 4:13 a.m., an explosion was heard in Gravesend; something big had landed in a lettuce patch. Ten minutes later, a second explosion damaged a railway bridge in London. For months there had been rumors that the Germans were developing a secret weapon to be unleashed if and when the Allies invaded France. Some said it was an invisible beam that would lay waste to all in its path, others an ingenious method for spraying poison gas, still others a superbomb more devastating than any previously conceived. After three days of investigation, the government confirmed that the Nazis were deploying a pilotless flying bomb called the V-1, or Vergeltungswaffe (vengeance weapon). Shaped like small airplanes, 27 feet long and 17 feet across the wings, they zoomed along at 350 miles per hour. Most were launched from ramps near the French and Dutch coasts, some by low-flying bombers.
Churchill at first adopted what Cadogan dubbed “the light-hearted bulldog view,” deeming the V-1s but a nuisance, the last gasp of a desperate regime. He paid more heed as the casualties and damage (11,000 houses a day) mounted. Many Britons were outraged at the authorities for not being better prepared. The attacks were harder for some civilians to cope with than the Blitz. When the future had seemed dark, danger was less daunting; now, on the threshold of victory, the prospect of death from the sky seemed a cruel trick.
One hundred or more of the bombs were sent toward England each day, and it was several weeks before defenses were able to intercept any at all. When we heard the loud buzzing, we held our breath. The sound meant that the rocket still had fuel and would rapidly pass by; when the noise stopped, so did the bomb, which would fall almost straight down. The V-1s were called “doodlebugs” because of their resemblance to the large buzzing insects of the same name. “One can see its little black body hurtling along,” wrote a Briton who was there, “with something flapping behind it which looks like gauze being blown out from an electric fan.” At night “this exhaust flames like a meteor, and one can follow the thing as it hurtles through the sky like a falling star . . . unswerving, vindictive, and horribly purposeful.”
The scream of sirens became common once more, and again I had the experience of sharing long hours with neighbors in an air-raid shelter. To pass the time, we sang “A Hundred Green Bottles” from start to finish, then again from the beginning. On some days the entire school-age population of Walton-on-Thames was confined to the shelter. The town, being south of London, was located in the middle of “bomb alley,” the flight path from the V-1 launch sites to the capital. In addition, British double agents—that is, English spies pretending to be Nazi spies—were instructed to tell Berlin that the bombs were overshooting London. The Germans shortened their aim, sending fewer bombs toward the densely populated city and more crashing down around us. On June 19, a V-1 shook the ground just a few blocks from our house; then another landed and another—a total of eighteen on our town. “Why are the doodlebugs in such a hurry?” went the joke. “You would be, too, if your behind was on fire!”
My father was a volunteer air-raid warden. That meant that when he returned from London each evening, he had to rush through the neighborhood making sure that everyone had their curtains drawn, even though the flying bombs had no pilots and couldn’t see. One night in the pitch dark, he ran into a brick pillar in front of our house, bloodying his nose and breaking his glasses. I was sympathetic but by then had my own problem: sleepwalking. Whether it was caused by the V-1s or not, I have never known, but for weeks I went to bed without being sure where I would end up. My parents and the Goldstückers, worried that our residence might be hit, bought a Morrison table, named after Home Secretary Herbert Morrison. Overnight, the heavy rectangular steel object became a center of our lives. We ate on it; the adults had their coffee and drinks while sitting around it; Kathy and I played on top of it; and when the siren sounded, all six of us dived under it.
One doodlebug fell outside the BBC headquarters, shattering windows and damaging the building. The midday Czechoslovak broadcast, which was about to begin, went on as scheduled despite injuries to a secretary and two announcers. Another time my father and Mr. Goldstücker arrived at Waterloo Station a few moments after a bomb hit. Ambulances had not yet arrived, and passengers were throwing down their briefcases to administer first aid to dazed and bleeding victims. On Sunday, June 18, one of the bombs smashed the roof of Guards Chapel in central London shortly after the weekly worship service had begun. Rubble buried the congregation, a mix of military and civilians, killing 121 and sending 140 more to the hospital. Two days were required to dig out the dead.
The doodle
bug raids lasted three months, taking the lives of more than 5,500 people and injuring thrice that number. As during the Blitz, tens of thousands of children were evacuated. The whole country celebrated when, in September, Allied troops overran the V-1 launch sites along the northern coast of Europe and Mr. Morrison announced that the second Battle of Britain had been won. By then, Rome and Paris had been retaken, as had Brussels. Returning evacuees clogged the train and tube stations in London while in Walton-on-Thames the centuries-old bells in Saint Mary’s Church resumed their cheerful ringing.
AUTUMN 1944: The Germans were being driven back on all fronts. Allied forces were advancing from the south, west, and east while firing relentlessly from the skies and at sea. In September, Luxembourg was free and Holland, too. The Red Army was moving through Poland, Romania, and the Balkans, surging via the dense Carpathian woods to the border of Slovakia. In November, partisans liberated Greece, and Churchill indulged in a well-earned day of speech giving and wreath laying as the guest of honor in a celebratory and inebriated Paris. German troops, hampered by the bombed-out rail lines and shortages of fuel, were taken prisoner by the gross. A captured codebook enabled the Americans to decipher enemy U-boat communications, leading to the destruction of nearly three hundred Nazi submarines in just a few months.
For Polish democrats, the prospect of being liberated from the Nazis by the Soviets had the appearance of a prayer only half answered. In August, the main resistance force, the home army, learned that Soviet troops had reached the eastern suburbs of Warsaw. Rather than wait to be freed by the Communists, the Poles resolved to do the job on their own. A force of 40,000 fighters (but with only 2,500 firearms) attacked German military outposts and civilian installations. A fierce struggle commenced as the entire city and surrounding area became a battleground. The beleaguered German commanders called in reinforcements and issued orders to exterminate every Pole. The rebels had hoped that panic caused by the uprising, coupled with fear of the approaching Soviets, would cause the Nazis to flee; it didn’t happen.
British, Polish, and South African pilots sought to save the fighters by flying in supplies from bases in the United Kingdom and Italy, but the quantities were not sufficient. A more effective airlift could have been mounted had the Soviets granted permission to use airfields under their control, but Stalin flatly refused. After several weeks of fighting, the momentum shifted in favor of the better-equipped Germans. In the end, the uprising became a debacle. An estimated 200,000 Poles were killed and another 800,000 captured or expelled from their homes. The Nazis looted every portion of the city before burning what was left. When, in January 1945, the Red Army and their Polish partisans finally entered Warsaw, they found much of it destroyed.
A pro-Soviet governing council was established in Lublin, the center of Poland’s southeast region. The London-based Polish democrats counted on the Allies for help in securing a role for themselves in any postwar settlement. President Beneš was not sympathetic. Past border disputes had left a bad taste in his mouth, and the most capable Polish leader, General Władysław Sikorski, had died two years earlier in a plane crash. From a diplomatic perspective, Beneš was convinced that the Polish exiles had played a weak hand badly. “Poland in this war has made one fundamental mistake,” he told a friend. “She can achieve her aims only with the help of Soviet Russia and the collaboration of the three great powers. . . . The Poles [think] . . . that they are strong enough to discuss the future as equals. . . . I learned long ago that the big nations always settle their questions among themselves at the expense of the small.”
The question Beneš did not address is whether the Poles ever had a chance. Unlike Czechoslovakia, their country had deeply felt grievances against the Soviets, who had inflicted terrible atrocities against its people and seized more than a third of its territory. Sikorski had, in fact, sought to mend relations, only to be rebuffed when he demanded, quite reasonably, that there be an international investigation of the Katyn Forest massacre. Stalin was unlikely to accept any arrangement that gave leverage to Polish democrats because he had already murdered so many. He also wanted his country to have the widest possible territorial buffer against Germany.
The Czechoslovaks, by contrast, could approach the Soviet Union as a friend. There was no history of conflict between the two and no apparent reason why they could not go on as partners. Beneš certainly favored that scenario. By his calculation, once the Nazis were defeated, the Russian military would dominate Central Europe. For every Western soldier in the region, the Russians had three. The British were too weak and too thinly spread to counter them, while the Americans and Canadians would want nothing more than to return home. What Stalin desired in the region, Stalin would get; the only course open was to influence what the Soviets felt they needed.
Accordingly, Beneš continued to make himself agreeable. Otherwise the Soviets might do in Czechoslovakia what they had already done in Poland and were preparing to do elsewhere: choose a replacement set of leaders and back them with money and arms. The Red Army would soon be in Czechoslovakia. If Beneš were to be there, too, he would need its help. Although London was the official center of the government in exile, the Czech and Slovak Communists in Moscow would have to be included in the postwar government. They lacked a leader of genuine stature, but their ideology gained in popularity every time Hitler denounced it.
Even as he was reassuring Stalin, Beneš had no wish to be seen as a Soviet minion. He insisted that his country could avoid having to choose between East and West. Hadn’t he signed a treaty of friendship with England as well as the USSR and journeyed to Washington before going to Moscow? Hadn’t Stalin promised to refrain from interfering in Czechoslovak democracy? Communist ideology called for the liquidation of bourgeois capitalism, but the Soviet government had just spent years fighting in a grand alliance with the West. Surely the shared interests that had brought the Communists and other parties together would still be present after the war?
Beneš was far from the only one who held this view. Aside from Stalin’s victims—of whom there were millions—people tended to have affection for old Uncle Joe. He was jovial, smoked a pipe, didn’t rant like Hitler, and seemed far more practical than ideological. More than that, when the outlook had been bleakest, his country had delivered. For years, every victory by the Soviet armed forces had been cause for cheers and sighs of relief in the West; that kind of experience makes a difference.
Harold Nicolson, a British parliamentarian who was close to Churchill, explained:
People say to me, “but why, when you cursed us for wishing to appease Hitler, do you advocate the appeasement of Stalin?” I reply, “[F]or several reasons. First, because the Nazi system was more evil than the Soviet system. Second, where Hitler used every surrender on our part as a stepping off point for further aggression, there does exist a line beyond which Stalin will not go. On a purely material basis, Stalin needs economic help from the Americans and so will not go too far to alienate. [My] feeling [is] that if we are patient, the Soviet tide will recede.”
In the Czechoslovak context, this analysis was buttressed by the reassuring rhetoric of the Communist leadership. Speaking from Moscow, Gottwald delivered scores of broadcasts about the importance of a united war effort. For inspiration, he cited not Marx and class solidarity, but Hus and patriotism. As a goal, he extolled the return of freedom, saying nothing about world revolution. In London, Vlado Clementis and the other Communist leaders spoke of their objectives in terms that could scarcely be distinguished from those of the democrats.
Beneš was what we might call today a democrat with socialist leanings. He favored state control of basic industries, a vigorous trade union movement, and generous public services. He had some sympathy for communism’s egalitarian ideals but doubted that the ideology could be applied in Czechoslovakia the way it had been in the USSR. He felt sure that most of his people would remain loyal to the democratic model established prior to the
war by Tomáš Masaryk. However, the senior Masaryk, far more than Beneš, had been an articulate and convincing critic of communism’s flaws. There was a reason why Lenin had called Masaryk his most serious intellectual opponent in Europe. Beneš, who sought to please almost everyone, found himself in the position of trying to champion democracy, implement leftist economic policies, mollify the West, and butter up Stalin all at the same time.
The frenetic maneuvering made some of the president’s democratic followers uncomfortable, but there was little they could do. Beneš responded to every expression of concern with an assurance that he knew exactly what he was doing. Jan Masaryk, for one, was not about to challenge his boss on matters of political ideology. Even his love for democracy was tempered by concerns about the fickleness of public opinion; after all, Hitler had adoring crowds and the British public had applauded Chamberlain after Munich. For Masaryk, the Communists’ greatest sin was that they took themselves too seriously. He told a friend, “Lenin said that people must stop listening to Beethoven, because he has the power of making people happy. He was afraid lest they would become too soft to make the revolution. There you have the whole of Lenin.”
LESS THAN A week after the last of the V-1s had taken to the air, V-2 rockets were unleashed. “What I want,” Hitler had demanded of his munitions designers, “is annihilation—[an] annihilating effect!” German engineers, long skilled in rocketry, set out to craft a technology powerful enough to destroy whole cities and thereby alter the outcome of the war. What they produced was a 9,000-pound, 46-foot-long missile, launched from mobile sites in Holland and France, that soared fifty miles into the sky before crashing without much precision into the urban neighborhoods, towns, and—more often than not—the empty fields and vacant lots of England. Unlike the doodlebugs, whose buzzing advertised their approach, these rockets were supersonic; their impact was felt before any sound could be heard. The doodlebugs had been tracked by radar, crippled by balloons, and shot down by fighters and antiaircraft guns. The V-2s flew too high and fast for such countermeasures. The payload was no match for Hitler’s fantasies but heavy enough to leave bus-size craters; the missiles were far more destructive than a conventional bomb. The British, who had a nickname for everything, called them “gooney birds,” another term for the albatross—big, awkward, and, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, very bad luck.
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