Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour
Lynne Olson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“we’re inclined to say what we think, even when we have not thought very much.”
“[Ed Murrow]would remark during a BBC broadcast: "It is difficult to explain the meaning of cold to people who are warm, the meaning of privation to people who have wanted only for luxuries...It is almost impossible to substitute intelligence for experience.”
“There was no bombing of the U.S. mainland, no civilian casualties, no destruction of millions of homes. Indeed, while the standard of living plummeted for the vast majority of Britons during the war, many if not most Americans lived better than ever before.”
“In Europe, Murrow observed to his wife, people were dying and "a thousand years of civilization [were] being smashed" while America remained on the sidelines. How could one possibly be objective or neutral about that?”
“[Ed Murrow] admitted he was having trouble coming to grips with the idea of peace: "Trying to realize what has happened, one's mind takes refuge in the past. The war that was seems more real than the peace that has come.”
“While Eisenhower and his staff agonized over D-Dsy at Bushy Park, a frenzied carnival atmosphere took hold in overcrowded, clamorous London. Traffic was gridlocked, restaurants and clubs were packed, and it took days, sometimes weeks, for newcomers to the capital to find a vacant hotel room or flat. Many of the new arrivals were American journalists, flooding in from all over the globe to be on hand for the biggest story of the war. Ernie Pyle, who had come to London from Tunisia, wrote: "I decided that if the Army failed to get ashore on D-Day, there would be enough American correspondents to force through a beachhead on their own.”
“The fondness of Britons for the uninhibited pilots was reciprocated by most of the Americans. Even those who had no real interest in aiding the British cause when they first enlisted in the RAF found themselves admiring the bravery and determination of the public in standing up to Hitler. “They were, without a shadow of a doubt, the most courageous people that I have ever known,” said one American. “Although their cities were in shambles, I never heard one Briton lose faith.” Another U.S. pilot declared: “To fight side by side with these people was the greatest of privileges.” After the war, Bill Geiger, who’d been a student at California’s Pasadena City College before he came to Britain, recalled the exact moment when he knew that the British cause was his as well. Leaving a London tailor’s shop, where he had just been measured for his RAF uniform, he noticed a man working at the bottom of a deep hole in the street, surrounded by barricades. “What’s he doing?” Geiger asked a policeman. “Sir,” the bobby replied, “he’s defusing a bomb.” Everyone standing there—the bobby, pedestrians, the man in the hole—was “so cool and calm and collected,” Geiger remembered. He added: “You get caught up in that kind of courage, and then pretty soon you say, ‘Now I want to be a part of this. I want to be part of these people. I want to be a part of what I see here and what I feel here.’ ” AS”
“The U.S. government offered no apologies. For the British to receive any aid at all, Roosevelt and his men believed, the American people must be persuaded that their own country was getting the better of the deal. "We seek to avoid all risks, all danger, but we make certain to get the profit," said the isolationist senator William Borah.”
“Still not recovered from the physical and emotional strains of the war, Winant was also bone-tired. "I have never seen a more exhausted man in my life," a friend and former business partner of Winant's said shortly after the war. "He had aged tremendously." Mary Lee Settle would later describe the war-caused enervation that she, Winant, and others experienced as a "deep brutal exhaustion that had seeped into our souls, our bodies, our relationships with each other, a kind of fatal disease of exhaustion." Eric Sevareid, who was only thirty-two when the war ended, noted that he had "a curious feeling of age, as though I had lived through a lifetime, not merely through my youth.”
“ON A WARM, drowsy afternoon in early September, Ed Murrow, Vincent Sheean, and Ben Robertson, a correspondent for the New York newspaper PM, stopped at the edge of a field several miles south of London. The three had spent the day driving down the Thames estuary in Murrow’s Talbot Sunbeam roadster, enjoying the sun and looking for dogfights between Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Their search had been fruitless, and they stopped to buy apples from a farmer. Stretching out on the field to eat them, they drowsily listened to the chirp of crickets and buzzing of bees. The war seemed very far away. Within minutes, however, it returned with a vengeance. Hearing the harsh throb of aircraft engines, the Americans looked up at a sky filled with wave after wave of swastika-emblazoned bombers that clearly were not heading for their targets of previous days—the coastal defenses and RAF bases of southern England. Following the curve of the Thames, they were aimed straight at London. In minutes the sky over the capital was suffused with a fiery red glow; black smoke billowed up into a vast cloud that blanketed much of the horizon. When shrapnel from antiaircraft guns rained down around the American reporters, they dived into a nearby ditch, where, stunned, they watched the seemingly endless procession of enemy aircraft flying north. “London is burning. London is burning,” Robertson kept repeating. Returning to the city, they found flames sweeping through the East End, consuming dockyards, oil tanks, factories, overcrowded tenements, and everything else in their path. Hundreds of people had been killed, thousands injured or driven from their homes. Under a blood-red moon, women pushed prams piled high with their salvaged belongings. That horrific evening marked the beginning of the Blitz: from September 7 on, London would endure fifty-seven straight nights of relentless bombing. Until then, no other city in history had ever been subjected to such an onslaught. Warsaw and Rotterdam had been heavily bombed by the Germans early in the war, but not for the length of time of the assault on London. Although”
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Book Keywords:
world-war-ii, london, edward-r-murrow, d-day
