Bravery of war’s unsung heroes
A new thesis uncovers occupied Europe’s vital role in fighting Nazis, writes Harold Evans
This is Lynne Olson’s fourth book dealing with Britain and the Second World War, but in Last
Hope Island she argues an arresting new thesis: that the people of occupied Europe and their expatriate leaders did far more for their own liberation than historians and the public recognise. Books and films have dramatised individual stories of the resistance, but the scale of the organisation she describes is breathtaking.
Every captive nation built escape networks. The air war against Germany was sustained by as many as 7,000 British, American and other downed Allied servicemen saved from captivity by local people, directed to a safe house, given false papers, warned that it would be fatal to look the “wrong” way crossing the road and spirited back to Britain.
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 dramatising great deeds done and then forgotten.
Neutral Norway had a population of fewer than three million people when invaded on 9 April, 1940. It made an impact out of all proportion to its size.
Its ships and crews helped keep the Atlantic sea lanes open. The path to the West’s atomic dominance can be said to have started with a smuggling operation at Oslo’s Fornebu Airport, organised by a Norwegian firm, a French banker-spy and the Earl of Suffolk. Under the eyes of German spies, they contrived to switch 26 canisters of heavy water to be sent 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 2014 movie The Imitation Game was a fair representation of the British achievements at Bletchley Park, but how many people realise cracking the code began with three Poles and a Frenchman before Britain’s Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman made breakthroughs? The Poles, in a forest bunker outside Warsaw, were all in their 20s, led by maths genius Marian Rejewski. He was the first to get sense out of the 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. The British, says Olson, were shockingly slow to acknowledge the debt to the Poles.
Olson’s focus is on the leaders of defeated countries who found refuge in London: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, along with Charles de Gaulle, the self-appointed leader of the Free French Forces. Her accounts of royal escapes from the Nazis are gripping. King Haakon’s convoys, for example, painted white, played hide and seek among Norway’s mountains with German bombers strafing wherever they thought they were.
Olson’s books have well honoured Britain’s heroism. In Last Hope Island she justifies her toast to the exiles and their compatriots. Alas, their valour and their vision of a united Europe, purged of the lethal nationalisms that cost 60 million lives, were betrayed by the Brexit referendum and by dishonest leaders who have learned nothing and forgotten everything.
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