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ALICIA’S FIRST ATTEMPT to “do her bit,” as people called it in the English manner, came in 1940, with the Battle of Britain under way. At the time, in the close-knit world of women’s aviation, the dominant, larger-than-life figure (since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart) was Jacqueline Cochran. As was the case with Alicia (and perhaps fewer than one hundred other women), Jackie Cochran had earned her transport pilot’s license in the early 1930s, and had then gone on not only to fly the mail but, as she described it, to “fly as far and fast and often as I could,” setting women’s speed and distance records across the country.
After the fall of France, with Britain’s survival hanging in the balance, a small group of volunteer (male) American pilots migrated to England, to help out flying transport planes for the hard-pressed, undermanned British air services, under a program called Wings for Britain. Jackie Cochran proposed forming a squadron of qualified women pilots, an adjunct to Wings for Britain, also to go to England and assist the American men, who already had more work than they could handle. One of the first American women pilots Cochran contacted was Alicia, who was thrilled to be asked. They exchanged letters; then she and Cochran met several times, once in Washington with one of Alicia’s old flying mentors, now Gen. Jimmy Doolittle. Alicia also took herself out to her old training grounds, Curtiss Field, not that far from Falaise, where she signed on for some brush-up instruction, familiarizing herself with new instruments and larger aircraft. Needless to say, all too soon there were obstacles put in the way of this fine, potentially dangerous, potentially useful adventure; not least by Harry Guggenheim, who one evening, at one of his Aeronautical Foundation conferences, was accosted by General Doolittle, who warmly congratulated Harry on his wife’s “spunk and spirit,” this regarding a project Guggenheim himself knew virtually nothing about. He promptly put his foot down, both as husband and copublisher, not only giving a sharp no to her notion of decamping to British airfields, even for the purpose of flying tinned beef to troops in Cornwall, but also pointing out the obvious, that as editor and copublisher of Newsday, she had an obligation, in his words, “to stay home and mind the store,” not least for the 130 employees who might need their paychecks. She was sore about Harry’s husbandly disapproval—the magisterial, voice-of-reason tone he took with her, a girl only trying to do her bit—but she also knew he was right, at least about Newsday, which didn’t make her any less sore. In any event, Jackie Cochran’s “Women’s Wings for Britain” never did get off the ground, not even after Pearl Harbor. When Alicia ran into Jimmy Doolitle later in the war, he told her, “Wait a few years.” For female pilots in the U.S. military, the wait would be about fifty years.
ANOTHER AREA in which Alicia tried to contribute something useful, with little result to show for it, was the politically charged one of Jewish immigration. Back in 1939, the worse-than-sad, truly horrible journey of the SS St. Louis had demonstrated, at least to those of a mind to look, that something was seriously wrong with U.S. immigration policy for European Jews. In brief, the St. Louis had departed Hamburg with nine hundred Jewish passengers, not steerage passengers either but passengers paying full fare, trying to escape from Hitler’s Germany. Once at sea, however, it turned out that no country would receive them; not Britain, not France, Spain, Portugal; not the United States, and so on, down the list. Possibly Cuba? The St. Louis slowly traversed the Atlantic, entered Havana’s harbor, but none of the passengers was permitted to disembark. One man tried to commit suicide by jumping overboard, and was taken under guard to a Cuban hospital. Only eighty miles from the United States, impassioned cables were sent by the St. Louis to American authorities, in effect to the Roosevelt administration’s State Department; but entry was still denied, with the ship then forced to return across the ocean, redepositing en route the remaining 899 Jews in Allied ports. With little public outcry, or even passing notice being taken of this debacle, a private committee was formed in May 1940, to “promote expanded immigration quotas for Jews,” in which Alicia Patterson Guggenheim took a prominent part, along with fellow publisher Marshall Field 3d, specifically calling for the rapid admission to the country of thousands of orphaned, destitute Jewish children from various parts of Europe. Alicia persuaded her mother-in-law, Mrs. Daniel Guggenheim, to turn over a large section of her nearby North Shore mansion for use as an orphanage, and work was begun transforming the Guggenheim Castle (as it was known) into a home for soon-to-be-appearing Jewish children. But none appeared. The reason eventually given was “political realities,” which in rough translation referred to the unwillingness of Congress to pass, or the Roosevelt administration to push the Wagner-Rogers Child Refugee Bill for increased Jewish immigration.
NOTE: After old Mrs. Guggenheim died, two years later, during the war, her vast, empty, splendidly turreted and crenellated castle was deeded to the U.S. Navy, to which it still belongs.
IN THE END, Alicia did find two children to take in, certainly Jewish and assuredly refugees, though far from typical victims of the period. Back when she had first spoken to her husband about wanting to do something for Jewish refugee children, her thought had been to take in some of them at Falaise, but Harry opposed the idea: Ordinary Jewish children, he said—that is, children from typical backgrounds—after spending any time in Falaise, would only look on their postwar post-Falaise lives as a dreadful comedown. Soon after that odd conversation, while at a cocktail party in Washington in June 1940, she heard from the British ambassador of two young Jewish children who seemed to need a safer home, and whose background could hardly fail to pass muster with Harry Guggenheim. The children, Patrick and Janka de Koenigswarter, aged five and three, were described as currently living with elderly grandparents just outside London, where bombs were falling and a German invasion was anticipated any month. Their father, a brave and glamorous young Frenchman, Baron de Koenigswarter, was away fighting with Free French forces in North Africa; their mother, the baroness, apparently also brave and glamorous, perhaps a spy or not a spy, after dropping off the children, was also on her way to North Africa, to join the Baron and fight the Germans. And who were these elderly grandparents? Their name was Rothschild, they were the English branch of the Rothschild family, whose residence, if you could call it that, close by London, where bombs were falling, was known for its 120 rooms, its five thousand acres, and its fine gallery of Titians and Rembrandts. Alicia quickly said yes to the ambassador, who set the paperwork in motion, confident that Harry would or could make no objection. Later that summer, when the two children arrived at Falaise (accompanied by their nanny, the formidable Miss Davenport), little Patrick de Koenigswarter was heard to remark politely, in his high, British schoolboy’s voice, “Oh, what a nice little house.”
Patrick and Janka de Koenigswarter, two Rothschild grandchildren, war refugees of a kind, at Falaise, Long Island.