Last Hope Island Quotes

“Not until the twenty-first century did the British government finally acknowledge officially that the Poles had indeed played a role in breaking Enigma. On July 12, 2001, a monument commemorating their contribution was installed on the grounds of Bletchley Park, Even so, it hardly did justice to the seminal nature of their work.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“WHEN MY HUSBAND, Stan Cloud, and I were researching the early years of World War II for our first book, The Murrow Boys, we happened to see an old movie about the Battle of Britain, which included a scene about a squadron of Polish pilots. Until then, we had no idea that any but British pilots had flown in that epic fight, and we wanted to find out more. In doing so, we discovered that dozens of Poles not only had participated but actually had played a critical role in winning the battle. We decided that their story, unknown to most Americans, deserved telling. But as we dug deeper, we realized that the importance of the Polish contribution to the Allied victory went far beyond the pilots’ exploits. The Poles and their wartime experiences became the subject of A Question of Honors, the second book we wrote together.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“Winston Churchill, whose raised right hand, with his index and middle fingers pointed up in the shape of a V, became his signature gesture for the rest of his life. In a BBC speech to the Continent in the summer of 1941, Churchill called the V sign “a symbol of the unconquerable will of the people of the occupied territories and a portent of the fate awaiting Nazi tyranny. So long as the people of Europe continue to refuse all collaboration with the invader, it is sure that his cause will perish and that Europe will be liberated.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“84 Charing Cross Road.)”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“I lower my head so that you don’t see my eyes, to deny you the joy of an exchanged glance,”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“Ever since her childhood, Wilhelmina later noted, she had been afraid that “people would laugh at me if I showed too much feeling for them.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“wet suit—and revealed white tie and tails underneath. Removing a small bottle of Hennessy XO cognac from his pocket, he took a swig and sprinkled a few drops over his elegant evening clothes. Only then did he stroll nonchalantly past a luxury seaside hotel crawling with German officers and hop on a tram—just another tipsy young Dutchman on his way home from a long night of partying. (Tazelaar’s exploit inspired the opening scene in the James Bond film Goldfinger, in which Bond goes ashore wearing a tuxedo under his wet suit.)”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“suffocating in the porridge of bureaucracy,” Roelfzema said. “Whether it was me or my dirty clothes, the subjects I raised or the intensity of my arguments, I made everyone visibly nervous….If I used words like ‘Occupation’ or ‘secret contacts,’ they recoiled as if I showed signs of advanced leprosy.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“For [people] who have never experienced sudden, total defeat and the almost overnight disappearance of their political elites; who have never lived under foreign occupation; who do not know what Nazi pressure meant; who have never had to worry first and last about food and physical survival…the warning must be heeded: do not judge too harshly.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“Soon after he came on board, Clark, a cigarette dangling from his lips, signaled a seismic shift in the BBC’s news policy when he announced to his staff, “Well, brothers, now that war’s come, your job is to tell the truth. And if you aren’t sure it is the truth, don’t use it.” In an internal memo, he wrote, “It seems to me that the only way to strengthen the morale of the people whose morale is worth strengthening, is to tell them the truth, and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“The Thirty-nine Steps.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“their mother.” All over England, other citadels of the British class system were falling to the Poles. One 303 Squadron pilot, shot down during the Battle of Britain, parachuted onto an exclusive golf course, landing near the eighth tee. The men playing the hole insisted on carting the dazed flier off to the clubhouse for drinks. Another parachuting pilot drifted into a copse near a private tennis club in the London suburbs. Three club members observed his descent as they awaited the arrival of a fourth for their weekly doubles match. They helped extricate the Pole from the trees and, giving up on their expected fourth, asked if he played. When the young pilot said he did, he was dressed in borrowed white flannels and was soon on the court, borrowed racket in hand.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“Again and again, the question was asked: What made the Poles so good? The answer wasn’t simple. Generally older than their British counterparts, most Polish pilots had hundreds of hours of flying time in a variety of aircraft, as well as combat experience in both Poland and France. Unlike British fliers, they had learned to fly in primitive, outdated planes and thus had not been trained to rely on a sophisticated radio and radar network. As a result, said one British flight instructor, “their understanding and handling of aircraft was exceptional.” Although they appreciated the value of tools such as radio and radar, the Poles never stopped using their eyes to locate the Luftwaffe. “Whereas British pilots are trained…to go exactly where they are told, Polish pilots are always turning and twisting their heads to spot a distant enemy,” an RAF flier noted. The Poles’ intensity of concentration was equaled only by their daring. British pilots were taught to fly and fight with caution. The Poles, by contrast, had been trained to be aggressive, to crowd and intimidate the enemy, to make him flinch and then bring him down. After firing a brief opening burst at a range of 150 to 200 yards, the Poles would close almost to point-blank range. “When they go tearing into enemy bombers and fighters they get so close you would think they were going to collide,” observed one RAF flier. On several occasions, crew members of Luftwaffe bombers, seeing that 303’s Hurricanes were about to attack, baled out before their planes were hit. On September 15, the Poles of”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“In 1945, the schoolchildren of Arnhem volunteered to care for the graves of the more than 1,700 Allied dead, mostly Britons and Poles, who were buried in the military cemetery in Oosterbeek, a wooded suburb of Arnhem where much of the fighting had occurred. Each child was assigned to one grave. In addition to laying flowers at the graves and keeping them tidy, the children wrote letters to the families of the men whose resting places they tended. Some developed close relationships with the families. When the children left school, they passed their responsibility on to a new generation of students, who did the same with the next generation. The tradition of “the flower children of Arnhem” still flourishes today.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“Soon after joining the agency, Marks set out to lessen the danger. His first step was to get rid of the codes that the agency had been using to communicate with its people in the field. They had come from MI6, which, for the first two years of SOE’s existence, had controlled its wireless circuits and provided its sets and coding. Marks was dismayed by the simplicity of the codes, which were based on classic English poems by Shakespeare and others that were “so familiar that an educated German was quite capable of recognizing them and guessing the cipher.” To replace them, he wrote poems of his own, ranging from ribald verses to tender love poems. He gave one of the latter, entitled “The Life That I Have,” to a twenty-one-year-old agent named Violette Szabo, who, after being parachuted into France in 1942, was eventually captured, tortured, and killed by the Gestapo. It read: The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours. The love that I have Of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours. A sleep I shall have A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours. Since then, the poem has developed a life of its own. It has been used in a movie about Szabo’s life, found in poetry anthologies, reprinted on a 9/11 victims’ website, and recited by Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky at their wedding in 2010. “Every code,” Marks would later say, “has a human face.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“Two months earlier, Victor de Laveleye, the organizer of BBC programs to Belgium, had urged his compatriots to demonstrate their resistance to German rule by scrawling the letter V on the walls of buildings throughout the country. De Laveleye, who had served as Belgian minister of justice before coming to London, told his listeners that the letter would serve as a symbol to unite and rally their sharply divided nation. (Belgium’s population in the north spoke Flemish, a variant of Dutch, and had close cultural and religious ties to the Netherlands, while Belgians in the south spoke French and were intimately linked to France.) As de Laveleye noted, V was the first letter of both the French word “victoire” and the Flemish word “vrijheid” (“freedom”), not to mention the English word “victory.” Belgians accepted de Laveleye’s challenge with gusto, chalking Vs on walls, doors, pavements, and telegraph and telephone poles. So did a growing number of the French, many of whom learned about the V campaign by listening to the BBC’s Belgian service. Although de Laveleye’s initiative was meant for Belgium, it spread across France in a matter of days. In both countries, chalk sales skyrocketed. A letter to the BBC from Normandy noted “a multitude of little Vs everywhere.” A correspondent from Argentière in the French Alps reported “an avalanche of Vs, even on vehicles and on the roads.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“At the Yalta Conference in early 1945, Franklin Roosevelt had made it clear that he had little interest in further close collaboration or partnership with the United States' Western Allies, whose empires and global influence were fast disintegrating. Serenely confident of his own country's power, he envisioned the Soviet Union and its main ally in dealing with postwar international problems.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema noted that "through the entire war, one dream never left us, not for single day : our homecoming to Holland as we remembered it. We did come home, but the memory was crushed by reality and the dream exploded. Our country lay before us unrecognizable, emaciated like a wretch from a concentration camp. We couldn't cope....”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“Those who thought of collaboration in simplistic terms could not comprehend the reality of trying to survive in an uncivilized, unstable environment in which the norms of society had broke down.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“On June 8, 1946, Britain staged an elaborate victory parade, inviting armed forces from more than thirty Allied nations to London in a joyous celebration of their collective efforts. Czechs and Norwegians marched down the mall that day, as did Chinese and Dutch, Frenchmen and Iranians, Belgians and Australians, Canadians and South Africans, Sikhs and Arabs, and many, many more. However, the Poles - the fourth largest contributor of manpower to the Allied effort in Europe- were nowhere to be seen. They had been deliberately and specifically barred by the government, for fear of offending Stalin.”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

“It seems to me that the only way to strengthen the morale of the people whose morale is worth strengthening, is to tell them the truth, and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible.” Clark”
― Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War