On a rainy spring morning in 1942, representatives of the exile governments of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg gathered for a meeting in central London. At that point, the outlook for the Allies seemed as dreary as London’s weather: the Soviets appeared to be close to defeat, while the United States and Britain were still reeling from Japanese drubbings in the Pacific. But the Belgians, Dutch, and Luxembourgians had not met to bemoan the present. Trusting that the Allies would triumph in the end, they were there to plan their postwar future.
The three small nations had much in common. Clustered together on the rim of western Europe, they were precariously situated between two major European powers, France and Germany. Like Norway, they had put their faith in neutrality before the war. Like Norway, too, the German invasion of their countries had disabused them of the belief in every country for itself.
Only by banding together politically and economically, they believed, could their nations regain control of their destinies. And if all of western Europe formed such close ties, perhaps it could once again establish a measure of influence and sorely needed security. In pursuing these goals, the three governments in exile decided they would lead the way.
In September 1944, after more negotiations, they signed what came to be known as the Benelux Treaty, which called for the elimination of all tariff duties on the exchange of imported goods between their countries and the establishment of common tariffs on imports from other nations. The treaty also laid the foundation for eventual free movement of workers, capital, and services. As a result of this groundbreaking pact, which took effect in 1948, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg helped change the face and future of Europe. The first stirring of the movement toward European unification, the Benelux Treaty became a catalyst for the more revolutionary steps soon to follow.
Paul-Henri Spaak
Among the leaders of the effort was Paul-Henri Spaak, the foreign minister of Belgium. Known as “Mr. Europe” after the war, Spaak became one of the founding fathers of the European union movement, together with such pioneers as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman of France. Thanks in no small part to Spaak’s close involvement, his hometown of Brussels emerged as the movement’s base—home to NATO and various other supranational organizations, including the current European Union.
It was a remarkable turnaround for a man who had started the war in disgrace. Spaak’s list of sins then were many: he had falsely accused King Leopold of treason, urged Belgium to capitulate to Germany in late 1940, and initially refused to go to England to continue his country’s war effort. Once the war ended, Spaak again became a lightning rod in his homeland when he launched his successful drive to keep Leopold from returning to the throne. In 1950, after the king had won a national plebiscite to resume his reign, Spaak and other leftist leaders orchestrated a new campaign to keep him out, which prompted a full-blown political crisis. A general strike was called, which quickly turned violent. Riots broke out in Brussels and other cities, and several people were killed. With Belgium on the brink of civil war, Leopold finally gave in and abdicated in favor of his son, Prince Baudouin.
Throughout his checkered political career, Spaak resembled a modern-day Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Confrontational and divisive in his own nation, he worked tirelessly after the war to heal the divisions among the countries of Europe and to bring them together. His transformation from rabble-rouser to international statesman was due largely to his three years in London. Thanks to the many new contacts he made there, his previously parochial outlook on the world became much more cosmopolitan. He even tried to learn to speak English, which, prior to his arrival in Britain, he had adamantly refused to do. He never quite mastered it; his biographer wrote that he was “rather like one of the Marx brothers pretending to talk in a foreign language.” Spaak himself once said, “I’m often told that I look like Winston Churchill and speak English like Charles Boyer, but I wish it were the other way around.”
Wartime London, as it happened, was a perfect breeding ground for European cooperation. Spaak and officials from all over the Continent worked and socialized together in a way that would never have been possible without the war. Their long stay in the British capital gave them a certain distance from narrow national concerns and allowed them to form close personal and official bonds that bore extraordinary fruit once the conflict was over. “If the European Community is compared to a house, those years of cooperative exile in wartime London are part of the foundation,” wrote the historian Robert W. Allen.
For Spaak, the integration of Europe became an obsession. In 1944, he took note of a final message that a member of the Belgian resistance had scrawled on the wall of her jail cell shortly before her execution by the Gestapo: “I have opened a door to you which none shall close.” Spaak declared, “When we have won this war, we must unite Europe. We cannot afford any more civil wars among our nations or we will destroy our civilization.”
Yet even as they worked for European union, Spaak and other movement leaders were eager to retain their close ties with the British. For all their wartime difficulties with Britain, the exile governments were keenly aware of how much they owed the country that had given them refuge when they most needed it. Indeed, many Europeans hoped, as one Dutch official put it, that “Britain, our closest wartime ally and friend, will not only participate in European cooperation but take the initiative.” That could happen, however, only if Britain agreed to abandon its historical insularity and, in Spaak’s words, “consent to think of itself as belonging to Europe.”
The Europeans looked to Winston Churchill, the man responsible for welcoming them to England in 1940, to lead the charge in aligning his country with the Continent. Initially, there seemed grounds for optimism. A longtime advocate of what he called “a United States of Europe,” Churchill had discussed various permutations of the idea with members of his government throughout the war. To Anthony Eden, he had envisioned a new Europe, guarded by an international police force, “in which the barriers between nations will be greatly minimized and unrestricted travel will be possible.”
After he lost the 1945 general election, Churchill devoted much of his time and energy to just such a unification campaign. In a speech that “fired multitudes of Europeans with hope and excitement,” he declared, “When the Nazi power was broken, I asked myself what was the best advice I could give my fellow citizens in our ravaged and exhausted continent. My counsel to Europe can be given in a single word: Unite!”
In 1949, Churchill’s efforts helped lead to the creation of a multilateral organization called the Council of Europe, based in the French city of Strasbourg. Among its ten members were Britain and five of the countries it had sheltered during the war: France, the Benelux nations, and Norway. From the start, however, the council’s raison d’être was unclear; with no power and no authority to act, it functioned, for the most part, as a debating society.
Spaak, who became the first president of the council’s assembly, grew tired of presiding over “solemn charades” of votes that approved “grandiose schemes [of European integration] which had no chance of being implemented.” In early 1950, he snapped, “I admire those who can remain calm in the face of the present state of a Europe…that for five years has been living in fear of the Russians and on the charity of the Americans. In the face of all this we remain impassive, as if history was standing still and as if we had decades at our disposal…to abandon selfish nationalistic viewpoints.”
It soon became evident to Spaak and other movement activists that Churchill, for all his eloquence, was unwilling to do anything concrete to make European union a reality and, further, that he and the British had no interest in becoming an integral part of Europe themselves. Indeed, Churchill had made his feelings clear in a Saturday Evening Post article written before the war: “We are with Europe but not of it. We are linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed.”
As Churchill saw it, Britain’s postwar destiny lay in its empire and a close alliance with the United States. He had underscored that view in his vehement declaration to de Gaulle in 1944: “Every time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea. Every time I must choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.”
His aloofness from European affairs had its roots, of course, in Britain’s centuries-old discomfort with continental entanglements. But it also had much to do with his and his country’s refusal to accept the fact that its days as a world power were over. It had been bankrupted by the war, and its empire was on the verge of slipping away. But, clinging to the memory of its days as one of the Allies’ Big Three, it couldn’t abide the idea of surrendering any part of its national sovereignty. In the words of the future German chancellor Willy Brandt, Britain was unable to meet European demands to “renounce the insularity of her past greatness” and join the Continent in an alliance.
Also explaining Britain’s standoffishness was its attitude toward the war. To the Europeans, World War II was a cataclysm that must never happen again. To the British, who had suffered neither invasion nor occupation, it was one of the proudest periods of their country’s history—a “moment of national reconciliation and rallying together, rather than a corrosive rent in the fabric of state and nation.” As Max Hastings remarked, the British came to regard the war “as the last hurrah of their greatness, a historic achievement to set against many postwar failures and disappointments.”
Whatever the reasons for Britain’s reserve, the European leaders had had enough. Realizing that it would never take the lead in the unification movement, they assumed the initiative themselves in 1950. In the forefront was Jean Monnet, an innovative, far-seeing French political economist who had spent most of the war in Washington, D.C., where he had served as an economic adviser to FDR and been a key figure in the United States’ enormously successful wartime industrial mobilization program.
In 1940, Monnet had wanted nothing to do with Charles de Gaulle, whom he considered an “apprentice dictator.” He had second thoughts three years later and became armaments minister in the general’s French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers. After the war, Monnet, as chairman of the French National Planning Board, was de Gaulle’s chief adviser on the reconstruction of the French economy.
In the spring of 1950, Monnet joined forces with Robert Schuman, France’s foreign minister and a former member of the French resistance, to introduce a revolutionary economic plan for Europe. Monnet’s and Schuman’s proposal called for the integration of the two key industries of France and Germany—coal and steel—under a jointly appointed central authority. According to what came to be known as the Schuman Plan, the two countries would surrender their rights to protect and subsidize those industries, making each powerless to use the materials for purely national interests, such as weapons production.
Up to that point, France had shown no interest in reconciling with its former enemy and occupier and rejected the idea of any treatment of Germany on an equal footing. By contrast, Monnet and Schuman were intent on binding the two countries into what Schuman called “an embrace so close that neither could draw back far enough to hit the other.” The new coal and steel community, which would be open to other European nations, “represents the first concrete step towards a European federation, which is imperative for the preservation of peace,” Schuman said. West Germany, led by its first postwar chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, agreed to participate in negotiations. For the first time in history, Germany was on the verge of allying itself on equal terms with its western European neighbors.
When it made the plan public, the French government purposefully administered snubs to both the United States and Britain, in retaliation for their rebuffs of de Gaulle and the Free French during the war. It informed the U.S. government just one day before it made the official announcement and gave the British no advance notice at all.
The French demanded that the countries interested in joining the community must give their answer by June 2, 1950, or remain outside. British leaders, almost all of whom were hostile to the idea, declined the invitation. Their rejection would cost them dearly in both political and economic terms. As the historians Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper put it, “any British pretension to the leadership of the Continent was finished.”
On April 18, 1951, six western European countries—France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg—signed the treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community. With this historic rapprochement between France and Germany, Europe took a giant step away from centuries of ruinous nationalism.
IN 1958, PAUL-HENRI SPAAK emerged as a pivotal figure behind the next great landmark event of European union—the creation of the European Economic Community (Common Market). Among Spaak’s contributions was the drafting of the EEC treaty, which called for gradual abolition of economic barriers among the six nations that made up the European Coal and Steel Community. When the EEC began accepting new members soon afterward, Britain once again declined the invitation.
Just two years later, however, the British began having second thoughts. Their empire was dissolving, and their economy was weak. Unlike most of the rest of western Europe, they were still recovering from wartime austerity: basic food rationing in Britain had lasted until 1954. In addition, their “special relationship” with the United States had not turned out to be the close-knit, equal partnership they had sought during and after the war. From the start, the United States had made clear who the dominant partner was. An example was the 1956 Suez crisis, when President Eisenhower used economic pressure to force Britain to halt an ill-advised invasion of Egypt by British, French, and Israeli troops.
In 1961, the British, attracted by the success of the EEC’s free trade policy, applied for membership in the organization. “If we try to remain aloof, bearing in mind that this will be happening simultaneously with contraction of our overseas possessions, we shall run the risk of losing political influence and of ceasing to be able to exercise any real claim to be a world power,” a British Cabinet committee had warned the year before.
Yet now that the British were ready, albeit reluctantly, to join forces with the rest of Europe, they found themselves stymied by the ally who had been their greatest wartime scourge: Charles de Gaulle. Immediately after the war, de Gaulle had headed France’s provisional government but had resigned in early 1946 because of sharp differences with other political leaders. In 1958, he had returned to power as president of France, still smarting from the humiliations he had suffered at the hands of Churchill and Roosevelt. When Britain applied for EEC membership, de Gaulle, recalling Churchill’s words that the British would always choose America over Europe, took great satisfaction in vetoing its application.
For the eleven years that de Gaulle governed France, Britain was blocked from the EEC. When it finally became a member in 1973, the community’s rules regarding agriculture and various other key areas had been set in ways that the British regarded as detrimental to their interests. “The price of British overdependence on the U.S. was that the country…aggravated its estrangement from the European Community,” wrote the BBC broadcaster Jeremy Paxman. “It has never caught up since. By the 1990s…it was left blowing in the wind.” In 1992, the Maastricht Treaty gave a new name, the European Union, to the EEC, which then numbered twelve members. Although Britain remained part of the expanded club, many of its citizens remained as skeptical about the European Union as they had been about its predecessor.
When World War II began in 1939, the British foreign minister, Lord Halifax, had spoken of his nation as being “on the fringe of this mad continent.” In June 2016, a majority of Britons, clearly still in full agreement with that assessment, voted to leave the European Union.
The EU certainly had given its detractors in Britain and elsewhere a host of reasons for their hostility. The steady creep of its powers and regulations, the repeated crises involving the Euro and other economic matters, its failure to cope with large-scale immigration, the bitter squabbling among member countries, have all been causes of great concern.
But the antagonism toward the EU does not diminish the fact that the achievements of the campaign for European integration campaign were—and are—remarkable, particularly in the first four decades after the war, when, as the British journalist and historian Neal Ascherson noted, “prosperity, security, health, and equality all increased” in western Europe. “What began as a drive to remove tariff barriers and to free commercial exchange,” the International Herald Tribune observed, “ended by banishing war between European nations [and] enriching the Continent beyond measure.”
European unification also brought into the Western fold the two members of the war’s Grand Alliance whose lands had fallen under Soviet domination. On July 9, 1997, eight years after their communist regimes crumbled, Poland and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO.* In 2004, Slovakia also became a NATO member, and in that same year, all three nations were admitted to the European Union.
The day after Poland entered NATO, President Bill Clinton spoke to thousands of jubilant Poles in the center of Warsaw’s Stare Miasto. “Never again will your fate be decided by others,” he promised. “Never again will the birthright of freedom be denied you.” Among the multitude who cheered Clinton’s words was Polish foreign minister Bronisław Geremek, whose Jewish father had perished at Auschwitz. Geremek later recalled that moment as “an unforgettable one for the country, a day on which its independence—so frequently swept away by historical storms—finally gained the protection that came with security guarantees by a mighty alliance. A day on which Poland found itself once again among its traditional allies.”
DESPITE THE ROCKY POSTWAR relationship between the British and the Continent, the memory of Britain’s wartime ties with occupied Europe continued to burn bright. For the Britons and Europeans who had worked together in London, the legacy of that period was deep and enduring. “During the Second World War, the bonds of friendship between Britain and the Netherlands were tightened in such a way that it had a lasting effect on our postwar relationship,” noted Frits Bolkestein, a former Dutch secretary of defense. “We in the Netherlands shall never forget what Britain meant to us in those difficult days.”
Even though his icy official relations with the British government never thawed, Charles de Gaulle felt much the same way. After Winston Churchill was defeated in 1945, de Gaulle wrote, “The essential and ineffaceable fact remained that without him, my undertaking would have been in vain from the start.” When Churchill died in 1965, de Gaulle was prominent among the mourners at his state funeral in London. The French president was joined by hundreds of former resistance fighters from throughout Europe.
The Europeans’ admiration of Churchill was rivaled only by their affection for the BBC, which, as Tom Hickman put it, “bordered on idolatry.” When postal service was restored in Europe at the end of the war, a tidal wave of letters of thanks poured into Bush House, four thousand letters from France in the first month alone. Long afterward, Alan Bullock remembered, “it was almost embarrassing to go to Europe because there was so much fuss made about the BBC.”
In the postwar years, a number of Europe’s state-run broadcasting networks adopted the BBC as their model, including France’s Radiodiffusion Française. In its inaugural transmission in October 1944, Radiodiffusion declared, “During the long dark four years, the BBC was a torch in the darkness and the embodiment of the promise of liberation. The world was in agony; but the BBC played its life-giving music. The world was submerged in lies; but the BBC proclaimed the truth. This tradition of truth and honor will be continued here.”
On a personal level, former European exiles credited their experiences in wartime London and the array of friends they’d made there with expanding their horizons and making them feel part of a larger world. Joachim Rønneberg, the leader of the Norwegian commandoes who blew up the Norsk Hydro plant in 1943, observed many years after the war, “The British made me feel as if I had two homelands. When I was stationed in Britain, we talked of going home on a mission, but in Norway, we talked of going home to Britain to relax or to take on new assignments.”
Many Britons, for their part, strove to maintain the close relationships they had formed with the Europeans who had been an integral part of their wartime lives. They included SOE’s Francis Cammaerts, who stayed in close touch with the French citizens who had sheltered and otherwise cared for him during the perilous period before and immediately after D-Day. He and they shared, he said, a “love which was neither physical nor intellectual. It was eternal. Nothing can take it away.”
Late in his life, Cammaerts and his wife settled in a small village in the Drôme Valley, an area in southeastern France where he had spent much of his time organizing resistance groups. From his house, he could see in the distance the Vercors plateau, where so many of his maquis had lost their lives in their gallant, doomed 1944 uprising against the Germans.
TO COMMEMORATE THEIR WARTIME bonds with the Europeans with whom they had worked, a number of British groups, military and civilian, organized annual reunions, some of which continue to this day. Among them was the RAF Escaping Society, sponsored and financed by the British Air Ministry as a way of paying tribute to the thousands of Europeans who had helped rescue downed Allied airmen. The society provided financial assistance to the families of escape network members who had been killed by the Germans and to members requiring medical treatment or who were otherwise in need. It also helped sponsor reunions between the airmen and those who had aided them.
Year after year, the most heavily attended gathering was the reunion celebrating the work of Andrée de Jongh’s Comet line. De Jongh herself was revered by the hundreds of Britons and Americans whom she and her network had saved. Following the war, she was awarded high civilian honors by both nations: the U.S. Medal of Freedom and the British George Medal. She spent most of the rest of her life working as a nurse in leper hospitals in Africa.
Shortly after the war, the RAF demonstrated its appreciation for de Jongh in a unique way. Learning that her mother was on her deathbed in Belgium, Air Ministry officials ordered an RAF training flight from Africa to Britain to make an unscheduled stop in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, where de Jongh was then living. The plane picked her up and, in another unscheduled leg of the flight, took her to Brussels. After her mother’s funeral, another RAF plane took her back to Ethiopia.
IN THE NETHERLANDS, the British veterans of Arnhem formed similar long-lasting ties with the civilians who had helped them survive after the debacle. The guiding force behind that effort was General John Hackett, who never forgot “the courage and compassion” displayed by the Dutch citizens who saved his life.
Shan Hackett’s distinguished military career continued for more than two decades after the war. He was named deputy chief of the Imperial General Staff and later became commander in chief of British troops in Germany. He also served as commander of NATO’s Northern Army Group, whose forces included the Dutch I Corps. After retiring from the army, Hackett was appointed head of King’s College in London. In the late 1960s, wearing a bowler and carrying an umbrella, he joined his students in marches demanding an increase in government student grants. In later years, he became a well-known television commentator and bestselling author.
Yet throughout Hackett’s long and busy life, “the spiritual experience” he had had in Arnhem stayed uppermost in his mind. “This was a battle,” he wrote, “but its significance as a human event transcends the military.” He and his wife frequently traveled to Holland to visit the de Nooij sisters and the rest of their extended family. De Nooij family members, in turn, often stayed with the Hacketts in England. Hackett also became close lifelong friends with several other residents of Ede whom he had met during his convalescence there, including the resistance members who had spirited him out of the hospital at Arnhem and had later guided him to freedom.
In September 1994, half a century after Operation Market Garden, Hackett and other British survivors of the battle unveiled a stone monument near Arnhem dedicated “To the People of Gelderland,” the Dutch province in which the fighting took place. Hackett wrote the inscription:
50 years ago British & Polish Airborne soldiers fought here against overwhelming odds to open the way into Germany and bring the war to an early end. Instead we brought death and destruction for which you have never blamed us….
You took us then into your homes as fugitives and friends, we took you forever into our hearts. This strong bond will continue long after we are all gone.
Shan Hackett died in 1997. By 2015, only a tiny handful of Arnhem survivors were still alive. But the prediction inscribed on the monument proved to be true: the attachment between the people of Arnhem and those who fought there has endured.
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.
Schoolchildren in Arnhem place flowers on the graves of Allied troops killed during Operation Market Garden. The annual ceremony continues to this day.
Every year in September, thousands of people from around the world gather in Arnhem to commemorate what had happened there so many years before. During a simple yet powerful ceremony, the children of Arnhem circulate throughout the cemetery, solemnly laying flowers at the bases of the hundreds of white crosses and Stars of David.
According to Gerrit Pijpers, a Dutch organizer of the annual commemoration, many of the battle’s survivors have asked over the years if they could have their ashes “buried here, next to their comrades.” To them, Pijpers said, “this is home.”