Citizens Of London shines light on three little known heroes of World War II

George VI, King of England, faces the greatest crisis the world has seen. It is a blustery afternoon in March 1941 and an ill wind blows across Great Britain as all the greatness is threatened by a Nazi invasion.

Queen Elizabeth with King George VI at Buckingham Palace after London bombing Sep 1940 during World War II. bombed historical british royalty 1940s

George VI, King of England, faces the greatest crisis the world has seen. It is a blustery afternoon in March 1941 and an ill wind blows across Great Britain as all the greatness is threatened by a Nazi invasion.

Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg has laid waste to vast tracts of Europe and Germany’s stormtroopers can smell English blood from across the Channel. Tens of thousands of British civilians and frontline troops have died under the raining terror that is the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign on British cities. German submarines are destroying merchant shipping in the North Atlantic. As supply lines are cut, Germany begins the slow merciless strangulation of its enemies.

One after another, nations have toppled like ninepins under Hitler’s attack. How could this small island off the coast of France hope to survive the inevitable tidal wave of destruction?

John Gilbert Winant. © Library of Congress

In the darkest hour he and his subjects have faced, 45-year-old King George is dressed in the uniform of an English field marshal as he waits nervously with his staff and assembled reporters at Windsor Station. Dispensing with royal pomp and protocol, the chain-smoking monarch greets the new American ambassador to Britain beside the train tracks and ushers him quickly into a waiting car for the ride to Windsor Castle and ­urgent talks.

John Gilbert Winant, a World War I pilot and former Republican governor of New Hampshire, is wearing a crumpled navy blue overcoat and is clutching not only a grey felt in his hand but the hopes of the British people who are hanging on to their freedom by their eyelids.

Winant will become a key figure in World War II, not only walking the streets of London during the heaviest bombing of the Blitz to cheer the battered locals, but reassuring millions that America will stand beside them.

A century-and-a-half earlier, the Americans, under George Washington, had won their freedom from Britain in the War of Independence.

18th March 1941: Portrait of American public official William Averell Harriman (1891-1986) seated at his desk, London, England. Harriman served as defense envoy to Britain under President Roosevelt. (Photo by New York Times Co./Getty Images)

Now, Winant is persuading the Americans to help Britain survive a much more brutal war.

Getting America’s help had been a battle in itself, as Lynne Olson describes in her magnificent, beautifully written history of those momentous times, Citizens Of London.

Joseph Kennedy, patriarch of the American political dynasty and Winant’s predecessor as ambassador in London, believed there was no hope for the British people and skedaddled home to his mansion in Boston at the height of the Blitz. Winant was made of sterner stuff.

The Times called him the adhesive that kept Britain’s alliance together, and he remarked that if man was to survive this perilous period, he “must learn to live together in friendship” and to “act as if the welfare of a neighbouring nation was almost as important as the welfare of your own”.

Olson, a former White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, highlights the role this shy, idealistic politician and two other prominent Americans, businessman Averell Harriman and journalist Ed Murrow, had in convincing the American government that Britain should be saved at all costs as a bulwark to Hitler’s plans for world domination.

“With London as the backdrop, I set out to tell the behind-the-scenes story of America’s wartime alliance with Britain, as seen from the point of view of these three Americans,” Olson says. “All of whom played critical roles in forging the alliance.”

Portrait of American broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow (1908 - 1965) in his US military war correspondent's uniform during World War II, February 2, 1945. (Photo by CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images)

While history credits the Anglo-American alliance that changed the momentum of the war to the partnership between British prime minister Winston Churchill and American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, it was Winant, Harriman and Murrow who laid the groundwork when Churchill and Roosevelt were not only strangers, but at times suspicious and even hostile toward each other.

Rarely, Olson writes, has diplomacy been so personal. Not only did Winant, Harriman and Murrow form close bonds with Churchill, but they also had love affairs with women in his family.

This is gripping, page-turning history, with the future of the free world hanging in the balance, dangerous liaisons and broken hearts behind the public jubilation.

Citizens Of London, Scribe, $28

Originally published as Citizens Of London shines light on three little known heroes of World War II