On arriving in London, Eaker’s party was taken on a drive through the battered but defiant metropolis. The German Blitz, eight months of fire and fear in 1940 and ’41, had killed some 30,000 Londoners and left another 50,000 injured. And on far fronts, the war was going disastrously for the Allies. In Libya, British forces had been soundly defeated by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s desert army; in Russia, the Red Army had been pushed back to Moscow and Leningrad; and in the Philippines, a starving, undermanned American force under Lt. Gen. Douglas C. MacArthur was making its final stand in the
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