April 20, 2013

Finest Hour 153, Winter 2011-12

Page 52

“The whole fury and might of the enemy” / Citizens of london

American’s felt the same paralyzing fear when a bomb whistled, the same overwhelming relief when it missed. They also felt the excitement, the energy that pulsed through wartime London: On the one hand, the constant threat of death; on the other, the elevation of standing tall.

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By Lynne Olson

Ms. Olson’s remarks were at the twenty-seventh International Churchill Conference in Charleston, South Carolina on 26 March 2011. Her latest book is Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour, published in 2010.

“Paris died like a beautiful woman, in a coma, without struggle, without knowing or even asking why. One left Paris with a feeling almost of relief. London one leaves with regret. Of all the great cities of Europe, London alone behaves with pride, and battered but stubborn dignity.”—Eric Sevareid

Come with me on a little trip back in time. I want you to imagine yourself here in America on August 24th, 1940. You and your family have finished dinner, and are gathered round the radio, as usual every night, to hear the latest news from the war in Europe.

A lot has happened since the war began almost a year ago, when Germany invaded Poland. You still haven’t been able to grasp how much the world has changed since then. Just four months ago the Germans conquered Norway and Demark, and then in May and June, the most shocking events of all, the German blitzkrieg smashed the Low Countries and France. Now only Britain is left, the last bastion of freedom in Europe, still standing against Hitler. But it’s hanging on by a thread.

The Battle of Britain has begun, and in the words of the Prime Minister, “the whole fury and might of the enemy” has been “turned upon us.” For more than a week the Luftwaffe bombed airfields, aircraft factories and radar installations in the south of England. On this very night of August 24th, more than 1000 German planes are dropping bombs on English targets, many of them very near London.

But when you tune in CBS, where you get most of your news these days, you don’t hear about the damage done by bombs, nor the latest military or diplomatic developments. Instead what you hear is a long report called “London After Dark,” about how Londoners are calmly living their lives in the midst of the worst crisis in their country’s history.

From the steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, on the edge of Trafalgar Square—places well known to American schoolchildren then—you hear the calm, deep voice of your favorite CBS correspondent, Edward R. Murrow. He tells you that an air raid is in progress, and he pauses so you can hear the sirens’ long wails, the crash of anti-aircraft guns. He describes the scene: searchlights sweeping the sky; red, doubledecker buses rumbling by in the darkness; pedestrians entering the shelter near the church. He then puts his microphone down on the ground so you can hear the click, click, click of people’s feet. The eerie sound of footsteps in the darkness, Murrow says, is like hearing ghosts wearing steel shoes.

Then, suddenly, you move from Ed Murrow and Trafalgar Square to the largest dance hall in London, the Hammersmith Palais. You hear an orchestra and recognize a hit song, “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” Eric Sevareid, another CBS correspondent, tells you he’s standing in the middle of a huge dance floor, with more than a thousand people swirling around him. A siren has gone off here, Sevareid says, but the band leader says the band will keep playing if anyone wants to stay. Only a few people have left.

“This is not Mayfair,” Sevareid adds. “Nobody comes here to be seen. They come here to dance, for the pure pleasure of dancing. Any American who thinks the British are a phlegmatic race should see them dancing around me tonight. These shop girls, these clerks, these workers, these people who make up the stuff of England, dance wonderfully well.”

Fast-forward now to 2011. I wanted to give you a flavor of that broadcast, which I first listened to a number of years ago when my husband, Stan Cloud, and I were doing research for our first book, The Murrow Boys, which is about Ed and the correspondents he hired to create CBS News. I spent several months in the basement of the National Archives in Washington, with earphones, listening to hundreds of recordings of CBS wartime news reports from London and the rest of Europe. It was a mind-blowing experience. Listening to those men—and one woman—talk about what was going on made the war come alive for me in a way that I had never experienced through books or contemporary print reports. I could hear the sounds, I could close my eyes and picture in my mind the places and the people as they were describing them.

You can imagine what this must have been like for American listeners in 1940. There was no television, no Internet, no cell phones; newsreels at the cinema were Saturday night luxuries. What Americans had then to connect them to the world, besides newspapers and magazines, was radio. It was a time when the medium truly met the moment.

Until the late 1930s, the term “radio news” was an oxymoron. The two largest networks, CBS and NBC, had no correspondents traveling around the world to find the news and relay it to the people back home. Edward R. Murrow set out to change that. As the threat of war increased in Europe, he convinced CBS to let him hire his own band of correspondents, who came to be known later as the Murrow Boys. When Germany launched the Battle of Britain and then the Blitz—which started, incidentally, just two weeks after that August 24th broadcast—that was what Murrow had been preparing for since he’d arrived in Europe. The Blitz was perfect for radio: it had immediacy, human drama, and, above all, sound. No other news medium could bring home to Americans the reality of what was going on in such a powerful way.

And it was done through people, taking complex issues and events and translating them into human terms. Murrow would tell his correspondents to imagine themselves standing before a fireplace back home, explaining to the local editor or dentist or shopkeeper what was going on. But imagine, too, he said, that a maid and her truck-driver husband are listening at the door. Use language and images that are as informative and compelling to them as to the guests around the fireplace.

Murrow believed that only by putting his listeners in the shoes of Londoners would the war begin to have real meaning for them. Eric Sevareid said Ed “made everything concrete and specific. He got down to the bare bones of things.” When you listened to Murrow, you felt as if you were there, standing next to him on the rubble-littered streets of London.

In one report, for example, he described rescue workers tunneling through the wreckage of a bombed-out house, gently lifting out limp figures “looking like broken, castaway, dust-covered dolls.” In his broadcasts, he focused on people like those rescue workers, ordinary Londoners who were the real front-line troops of the Blitz, people like—in his words—”those black-faced men with bloodshot eyes fighting fires, the girls who cradle the steering wheel of a heavy ambulance in their arms, the policeman who stands guard over that unexploded bomb.”

All this, of course, made a huge impression on the people back home. It’s important to remember that at that point, only a tiny fraction of American citizens had traveled abroad. Before World War II most Americans did not know much about what was going on in Britain or Europe, nor did they much care. What they did know is that they had no interest or intention in getting involved in another bloodbath like World War I. Ernest Hemingway voiced the prevailing view in his country when he wrote: “We were fools to be sucked in once in a European war, and we shall never be sucked in again.”

That feeling of isolationism began to change after the shocking events of the German blitzkrieg in the spring of 1940. More Americans began to think they must be involved. That idea became even more pronounced during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. One of the main reasons for this was the reporting of American journalists in London. Of course, it wasn’t just Murrow and the other CBS correspondents who were responsible. I’ve been talking about them because they were the most influential.

While most Americans still got their news from radio, newsreels, newspapers, and magazines were contributing too. Life magazine, which had been created just four years before and was already the most popular magazine in America, provided another powerful way to tell the story of the British in their finest hour. With its candid photographs of news-makers and events, Life offered a window on the world that was irresistible to millions of Americans. And one particular corner of the world it focused on was Britain during the Blitz.

Virtually every issue of Life during that period pictured the British coping with the horror of German air raids. Many photos were memorable, like one taken by the British society photographer Cecil Beaton, showing an adorable, wide-eyed little girl of about three, blonde and cute, in a London hospital bed, her head wrapped in bandages, clutching a rag doll. She’d been injured by shrapnel. That extraordinary photo made Life‘s cover. It touched hearts everywhere.

Another wonderful Life cover during that period was one we’ve all seen, the great Karsh portrait of Churchill scowling, with one hand in his vest pocket and the other leaning on his walking stick. The inside story of the scowl is that Karsh had snatched the cigar out of his mouth, producing the wonderful bulldog frown, which captures so amazingly his indomitable spirit. It had a tremendous effect on Americans, as, of course, did Churchill’s speeches, which they listened to on the radio, and helped make him the great hero he remains in the USA today.

It’s pretty obvious to you by now that that American journalists in London were not neutral in their feelings about what was going on, and many were not neutral in their reporting. Several had been stationed in London for years, and those who had been there in the mid-to-late 1930s had, for the most part, been much opposed to Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing the dictators. Some were quite close to Churchill and the few members of Parliament who spoke out against that policy.

Ed Murrow was one of them. Although never openly critical of Chamberlain, he would often report what Churchill and the “Troublesome Young Men” in Parliament were saying about the prime minister. He even invited the rebels to broadcast to America via CBS—their only radio outlet, since the pro-Appeasement BBC refused to broadcast critics.

Naturally, when Churchill finally came to power in May 1940, he was very well disposed toward Murrow and other American correspondents. He was also aware of how essential they were in influencing U.S. public opinion. He knew even then that Britain could survive ultimately only if the U.S. got into the war. So he did everything he could to make the American correspondents’ job easier. When government officials turned down Murrow’s request to broadcast live during the Blitz, Churchill overruled them. Anything that might help persuade America to come to the aid of Britain had his blessing.

In 1940, Murrow was the most influential American in town, and Churchill courted him, as he did other influential Americans who came later, like Averell Harriman and John Winant (page 38). Churchill, Murrow and their wives saw quite a bit of each other, as Fred Glueckstein has explained in “This….Is London: Ed Murrow’s Churchill Experience” (Finest Hour 144:26).

What an extraordinary experience it must have been for American correspondents to be covering London with her back to the wall. Their own country had not been attacked by a foreign power in over a century, and prided itself on its safety. But in London, safety wasn’t an option. On the first night of the Blitz, with German bombs falling around him, Eric Sevareid thought to himself: “You can’t do this to me! I’m an American!” He wrote later: “Luckily, that moment was brief.”

Sevareid’s and others’ experiences in the Blitz became a key element in American coverage. They had a strong empathy with London residents under fire, because they were residents, too. They felt the same paralyzing fear when they heard the high-pitched whistle of a falling bomb, the same overwhelming relief when it exploded some distance away. But they also felt the excitement, the sense of energy that pulsed through London. On the one hand, you had the constant threat of death, and on the other the exhilaration of survival—the thrill of standing tall against Hitler. An American reporter named Ben Robertson said: “The city in this crisis had rediscovered itself; it was living as it never had lived….You came out on the street at daybreak now with the feeling that you personally had been helping to save the world.”

When American correspondents left London for the U.S. or other neutral countries, they usually looked forward to getting away from the incessant fear and terror. But, once they’d arrived at some peaceful locale, some felt a sense of alienation—from locals who had no idea of what it was like to live on a battlefield. Many couldn’t wait to get be back to London. Robertson was one of them. He spent a few days in neutral Ireland in 1940, recalling that it “was like reaching heaven to arrive in Dublin….there were lights on, and suddenly you were free.” At the same time, he added, it was a “profoundly disturbing” experience: “All the good life made you very restless. You found when you were away from London…you could not keep from worrying. You worried about London and about everyone you knew in London.”

Like most of his American colleagues, Robertson believed that his country’s official neutrality was wrong, and in making this clear, American writers were not blurring the line between journalism and propaganda. At the very least, they were violating journalistic standards of objectivity, which means reporting news without personal prejudice, opinion, or point of view.

Reporters like Robertson and Murrow thought that the idea of objectivity absurd. They knew what was happening across Nazi-occupied Europe, knew that countless people were dying, that a thousand years of history and civilization being smashed. How could one possibly be neutral about that?

A BBC reporter who knew Murrow well said that “He wanted the Americans to face up to their responsibilities. They either had to see the whole Western world go down…or stand up and fight.” To a friend back home , Murrow wrote: “If the light of the world is to come from the West, somebody had better start lighting some bonfires.”

About a year after he wrote this, the United States did get into the war, with a slight nudge from the Japanese. Four years after that, the Allies were victorious, and American correspondents in London and elsewhere in Europe began to filter home. For many, it was a wrenching experience: being torn from a dear friend who had survived the worst.

Before Murrow returned to New York in 1946, he went on the BBC to say good-bye. In his youth, he said, he had been unimpressed with Britain: “Your country was sort of a museum piece,” he said, “pleasant but small. You seemed slow, indifferent and exceedingly complacent…I thought your climate unbearable, your class consciousness offensive.” Then came the war, and he watched the British fight back while remaining faithful to principles of freedom and democracy. His early impressions had been wrong, Murrow continued: “I have been privileged to see an entire people give the reply to tyranny that their history demanded of them…You have lived a life, not an apology.”

For the rest of his relatively short life, Edward R. Murrow never stopped missing London.

Murrow wasn’t alone. Drew Middleton of The New York Times, who spent much of the war in the capital, said, “The years there were the happiest of my life…One can ask no more than to live in a place he knows and loves, among people he understands, respects and likes.” To some Americans who lived through the Blitz, London resembled Brigadoon, the mythical Scottish village where courage, resolution, sacrifice, and a sense of unity and purpose triumphed, if only for a short time. Eric Sevareid made this point in a broadcast at the height of the Blitz in October 1940. He had arrived in the British capital just after the fall of France, and like Murrow, he too doubted whether the “smug, insular British” could stand up to Hitler. By the time he left, his doubts had vanished. Once a self-described “American stranger,” he now felt himself to be part of the embattled community.

In his last broadcast, Sevareid compared his departure with his from Paris, days before it fell to the Germans. “Paris,” he said, “died like a beautiful woman, in a coma, without struggle, without knowing or even asking why. One left Paris with a feeling almost of relief. London one leaves with regret. Of all the great cities of Europe, London alone behaves with pride, and battered but stubborn dignity.”

As he spoke Sevareid fought to keep his voice steady. At the end he gave up, and his voice choked with emotion: “Someone wrote the other day, ‘When this is all over, in years to come, men will speak of this war and say, ‘I was a soldier,’ ‘I was a sailor,’ or ‘I was a pilot.’ Others will say with equal pride, ‘I was a citizen of London.'”