Status Updates From Last Hope Island: Britain, ...

“…FDR felt nothing but disdain for Charles de Gaulle and France. He had little understanding of the complexity of the situation in that defeated, traumatized country…All he knew or cared about was that it had failed the Allied cause” (211).

😡 This to a country that still TODAY bears the wounds of the Great War. 😭

Ch 13 is exposing some painful catch-22s. The smaller nations of Europe were most affected by Nazi Germany. So they should have had a say in the post-war world. But because they were so affected, they often didn’t have the resources to do so. There is no doubt that the Allies would not have won the war without the U.S. and USSR, but their leaders’ callous attitudes towards the smaller nations is painful to read

“When their [German] occupiers shut down government institutions such as courts and the national legislature, the Poles re-created them as part of a remarkable underground society. They did the same with schools…Poland’s most esteemed university…offered underground study in all its departments. More than 800 students attended, including Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II…” (168-169).

Oooh the Earl of Suffolk is a combination of “sir Francis Drake and the Scarlet Pimpernel”! I think we need a novel about him!

I love how this book corrects my assumption that it was Britain and Britain alone who kept the early WWII vigil. This chapter quotes a British official who said that “the Norwegian merchant fleet was worth more to England ‘than an army of a million men’” because without them, the Allies would likely have lost the Battle of the Atlantic.