Last Hope Island

Lynne Olson’s Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War is a 500+ page epic of World War 2. Rather than focus on a single subject, say a battle, person or group, she ranges over all of them and more.

Throughout her emphasis is on human stories, the individuals who played an important role in the War. She begins with the leaders of the Nazi occupied countries who took refugee in London and the difficult decision they had to make in leaving their homeland.

They include the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, King Haakon of Norway, King Leopold of Belgium, the imperious Charles De Gaulle, the self-proclaimed leader of the French Republic, and the resistance leaders, code-breakers and fighter pilots of Poland. Together they formed a group in London that was instrumental in guiding the resistance groups in their countries and contributing to the the defense of Great Britain.

At some length Olson describes these groups, their leaders and fates especially those in France and The Netherlands. We learn about the disaster that over took the Dutch resistance, as the Nazis captured their leader, who was forced to reveal their codes and his communications with London.

But on the whole the resistance played a crucial role in the Allied defeat of Germany. She quotes Eisenhower who wrote in his memoirs that the resistance was of “inestimable value to the [French] campaign. Without there great assistance, the liberation of France would have consumed a much longer and and meant greater losses to ourselves.”

She depicts several of the groups in France and their efforts to return captured Allied airmen to England. She writes: “In all, some 7000 American servicemen, most of them air crew were spirited out of occupied Europe during the was…At a time when trained bomber crews were in desperately short supply, it was vital for the Allied war effort to retrieve as many airmen as possible and bring them back to England to continue the fight.”

The transfer worked like an assembly line. The down airmen were taken to the nearest safe house, from there they were transported hundreds of miles over many days by resistance members to a chain of safe houses to the foothills of the Pyrenees. From that point Spanish guides escorted them over the mountains to neutral Spain, whereupon they were flown back to England.

Almost uniformly the downed airmen formed a close bond with the hundreds of ordinary French citizens—men, women, and children—who sheltered, clothed, and fed them during their months in the country. They traveled from one family to another, putting each airmen’s life in their hands while risking theirs. There were hundreds of thousands of these caregivers all over France—people who never carried a gun or threw a grenade but whose willingness to provide safe houses for those who did made them invaluable members of the resistance.

Such people were the heart of the resistance. Most of them won no medals or honors after the war, nor were books written about them, unlike the top resistance leaders and various SOE (Special Operation Executive) agents.

One British airman wrote: “What has continuously irritated me has been the talk about the resistance as if it was created by a few heroes and heroines and they’ve tried to make me a hero, whereas the most important thing was the heroism of the people we were living with….They were sacrificing everything—children, partners, elderly relations, their land.”

Once again, I ask myself, as I did in discussing Nathan Englander’s The Anne Frank Game, would I be willing to offer my home as a safe house, at enormous risk to myself and my family. I’d like to think I would, but I’m fully aware of how difficult it is to predict future behavior or how I would act when confronted with the actual situation.

Throughout her book, Olson depicts the fraught relationship between Roosevelt, (who held off as long as possible before committing the United States to the War), Churchill, Stalin and de Gaulle. But in the end, they put their disputes aside and joined their forces together to defeat the army of the Third Reich.

For me, Last Hope Island recaptured once again the courage of so many individuals who fought in one way or another in World War 2. While it treats the countless traumas of the War and although it is a very lengthy tome (I’ve only touched on a few of the subjects Olson treats), it was, quite simply, a fascinating book to read.