For Some, Britain Proved a Port in the Storm of War
This content was originally published by HAROLD EVANS on 5 May 2017 | 2:54 pm.
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Having made a good case for selfliberation, Olson raises her bid on behalf of the occupied countries: “Without their help, the British might well have lost the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic and might never have conquered the Germans’ fiendishly complex Enigma code.” The claim invites a challenge, but she is persuasive in dramatizing great deeds done and then forgotten or unappreciated.
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Neutral Norway, at peace for more than a century, had a population of fewer than three million people when invaded on April 9, 1940. It made an impact out of all proportion to its size. Its ships and crews helped keep the Atlantic sea lanes open throughout the war. The path to the West’s atomic dominance can be said to have started with a cheeky smuggling operation at Oslo’s Fornebu Airport, organized by a Norwegian company, a French banker-spy and the British Earl of Suffolk. Under the eyes of German spies, they contrived to switch 26 canisters of heavy water to be transported on a plane bound for Amsterdam to one heading for Scotland. Two intercepting Luftwaffe fighters forced the Amsterdam plane to land in Hamburg. Its cargo was crates of crushed granite.
Enigma, the German cipher machine, was every bit as important as the author suggests, and again it advances her case for the occupied countries. The exciting 2014 movie “The Imitation Game” was a fair representation of the British achievements at Bletchley Park, but how many people realize that cracking the “fiendishly complex” code began with three Poles and a Frenchman before Britain’s Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman made their breakthroughs? The Poles, secreted in a forest bunker outside Warsaw, were all in their 20s, led by a mathematics genius by the name of Marian Rejewski. He was the first to get sense out of the German machine. The Frenchman, Gustave Bertrand, was the head of French radio intelligence who, in 1933, bribed a German in the military cipher department for four diagrams of Enigma’s construction. Still fewer will know that after the war, Rejewski, who had done so much to win it, was left to rot in “liberated” Poland under constant surveillance by the Communist secret police. And that the British were shockingly slow to acknowledge the debt to the Poles.
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Churchill’s “action this day” order accelerated the Bletchley Park operations, but he could not save Poland or Czechoslovakia from Communist tyranny. He cast a strategic eye on the smaller European countries, and always wanted to shake hands with the Russians as far east as possible. But he had little help from Roosevelt in the arguments at Tehran and Yalta. Nor did he have the support of Roosevelt in pressing Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower to risk marching into Prague and Berlin before the Red Army. When I interviewed Richard Nixon in 1993, he told me that Eisenhower was haunted by having forbidden Gen. George Patton from entering Prague to join the rebellious Czechs; he felt vulnerable to the possibility of Senator McCarthy blaming him for the subsequent Communist takeover.
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Queen Wilhelmina of HollandCredit
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Olson’s focus is on the leaders of six defeated countries who found refuge in London: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, along with Gen. Charles de Gaulle, the self-appointed leader of the Free French Forces. Her descriptions of royal escapes from the Nazis are gripping. King Haakon’s convoys, painted white, played hide and seek among Norway’s mountains and glaciers with German bombers strafing wherever they thought the king might be. The Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, was stuck in a little air-raid shelter in her palace garden while thousands of Nazi paratroopers arrived before dawn as she had predicted they would. She was cut off from her complacent ministers, who were glad to avoid the wrath they deserved for ignoring her warnings that Hitler and his “bandits” had no respect for the country’s neutrality.
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Olson is sensitive to the traumas of the deposed in having to decide whether to stay as hostages in the hope of sparing their populations the torments of Nazi rule or risk the charge of desertion by fleeing to London. It is not as if the last-hope island was a sure sanctuary. That’s hindsight. The neutral countries were stunned by the British-French betrayal of Czechoslovakia and then by their unwillingness to try to prevent Poland’s dismemberment by the Nazis and the Soviets. About six million Poles were killed in the war.
Churchill’s appointment as prime minister on May 10, 1940, ensured a warm welcome for the exiles, out of his natural human sympathies, and his recognition that Britain would need all the help it could get from the foreigners it had despised as inept or cowardly or both. This makes it all the odder that Churchill has portrayed World War II as an unalloyed American-British-Soviet triumph. Throughout the conflict and in his histories, Olson writes, he promoted the idea of plucky little England and its united empire maintaining the struggle “single-handed” until joined by Russia and later by the United States.
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Olson’s histories have well honored Britain’s heroism. In “Last Hope Island” she justifies her toast to the exiles and their compatriots. Alas, their valor and their vision of a united Europe, purged of the lethal nationalisms that cost 60 million lives, were betrayed by the reckless Brexit referendum in June 2016 and by dishonest leaders who have learned nothing and forgotten everything.
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