The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (37 page)

6: Freedom from Want: UNRRA and the Relief Effort to Save Europe

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N MAY 20, 1945, twelve days after the official end of the war in Europe, the last German garrison in Greece surrendered. The Germans turned

over control of this outpost—on the Greek island of Mi- los, in the Cyclades—to a small British and Greek force of soldiers. For four years this island and its 6,500 in- habitants had been ruled by Germans. The occupiers had built a nearly impregnable system of fortifications there, ringed by over ten thousand mines. They con- structed an underground hospital, laid in large stock- piles of food and medicines, and were prepared to fend off whatever landing force was sent against them. But the people aboard the landing craft that came to the island on this day in May were not bent on destruction. Instead, the ships that knifed through the blue-green Mediterranean waters toward Milos carried tons of clothing and medical supplies, and among the soldiers stood a team of physicians, health, welfare, and sanita- tion experts, all wearing a uniform not yet familiar in these parts: a drab gray ensemble with a strange new shoulder patch bearing the letters UNRRA. The Ger- man soldiers, once taken into custody as POWs, in- quired about this acronym. They were told that these letters stood for the United Nations Relief and Reha-

bilitation Administration, an international humanitar- ian agency representing forty-four Allied nations that had taken up the challenge of feeding and healing the victims of war in Europe. One of the soldiers said, “you must mean 44 states of America”; no, he was told, there were in fact forty-four nations ready to offer help to the millions of victims of Germany’s predatory war.
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Founded in November 1943, a year and a half before the United Nations itself saw the light of day, UNRRA (pronounced un-ruh) was more than just another wartime bureaucracy. It was designed not for war but for peace, and it aimed to organize the world’s goods and foodstuffs, which were in desperately short sup- ply, on behalf of the liberated peoples of Europe (and China, though we shall leave UNRRA’s Asian dimension aside here). UNRRA evolved into a massive purchas- ing agency, a global shipping network, and a sophisti- cated medical emergency operation that, by 1945, was serving in over a dozen European nations with a staff of 10,000 trained employees. UNRRA also supervised nearly 125 international private relief organizations, which throughout the war raised money and goods for the relief of Europe. Where there had been starvation, disease, and scarcity, UNRRA aimed to provide shelter, food, supplies—and hope. Allied leaders believed UN- RRA could help win the peace and transform victory on

the battlefield into an enduring liberation.

This work was not easy, and UNRRA provides a superb case study of the difficulties facing the liberators in the aftermath of war. UNRRA’s founders bickered over who would pay for it, and who would benefit from its lar- gesse. No one was ever quite clear over the relationship between this new organization and the powerful armies that held the field. Some American political figures questioned the wisdom of spending money on assist- ing people such as the Poles, Ukrainians, and Yugoslavs who seemed increasingly pro- Soviet and ideologically hostile to the West. On the ground level, UNRRA suf- fered from a good deal of reckless amateurism, poor planning, and just plain naïveté. Its well-meaning but overmatched staff sometimes seemed like playground matrons trying to keep order in a nasty world of knife fights and street brawls. The new agency hired thou- sands of people from across the world, among whom inevitably figured a variety of do-gooders, zealots, proselytizers, church folk, amateur doctors, adventure seekers, retired majors from the British colonies, New Dealers, wheeler-dealers, and other people who per- haps just wanted a piece of the “good war.” UNRRA also fell afoul of the Allied armies, which saw it as meddling, and a threat to their control of the European occupa- tions. Even the voluntary relief groups it was supposed

to supervise felt UNRRA curtailed their independence, and placed obstacles in the way of their own work. Con- temporaries often stressed UNRRA’s shortcomings and the flaws of its personnel, and historians have tended to follow suit.
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Yet the records left by many who received its aid show that UNRRA succeeded on the human scale. The agen- cy shipped about $4 billion of food, medicine, and agricultural and industrial equipment to Europe and Asia, and did so at a time of world shortages and enor- mous transportation and shipping difficulties. Just as important was the compassion and decency that most UNRRA workers demonstrated under difficult circum- stances. Grouped into teams of about a dozen workers and sent out into the field, UNRRA staff were often the first nonviolent foreigners many Europeans encoun- tered after the war. After a few weeks of rudimentary training in centers in the United States (at College Park, Maryland) or in France (chiefly at Granville, in Normandy), relief teams were sent into the field to start the hard work of creating order: by registering displaced persons (DPs), setting up clinics, restarting import offices, assessing public health needs, and call- ing back to the central headquarters with detailed ac- counts of what they found and what further help was needed. It required courage and a great deal of ingenu-

ity and commitment for UNRRA staff to make a differ- ence in wartime conditions, but their work did register on the lives of Europeans, especially on the DPs, who were Europe’s most vulnerable. These men and women were paid poorly; they were amateurs; they sometimes earned the scorn of local officials and even the refugees they were supposed to serve. For those Europeans who desperately yearned for some simple, humane gesture to show that peace had really come, UNRRA’s simple gifts—a new suit of clothes, or a medical examination, an inoculation, shelter and a meal—provided a link to a new world, one in which violence and cruelty and mur- der gave way to dignity and freedom.

The idea for UNRRA emerged first from exchanges be- tween British and American officials in early 1942 about how to provide relief for the devastated areas of Eu- rope once the war ended. Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, the British government’s chief economic adviser, stressed in February 1942 that “unless steps can be taken rap- idly to ensure at least minimum supplies to the neces- sitous areas, a process of social disintegration may set in which will create further dangerous strains…. It ap- pears essential that arrangements should not be left for settlement until an Armistice has been concluded.” After the Allied landings in North Africa in October 1942, and the smashing Soviet victory at Stalingrad in

early 1943, the Allied nations began to see the need for an international humanitarian agency that could bring initial relief to newly liberated peoples. By March 1943, the great powers had sketched a draft for UNRRA, and in November 1943, representatives of forty-four na- tions convened in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to sign the new agency’s charter.
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But no one seemed to know just what UNNRA was sup- posed to do. President Franklin Roosevelt told the U.S. Congress that UNRRA would restore health and vigor to newly liberated Europeans so they could get back in the fight against Hitler. The brutal German and Japa- nese occupations, he said, had created “a generation of half-men—undernourished, crushed in body and spirit, without strength or incentive to hope—ready, in fact, to be enslaved and used as beasts of burden.” If the Allied armies could heal these people and de- ploy them in the war against Germany and Japan, “the length of the war may be materially shortened…. Aid to the liberated peoples during the war is thus a mat- ter of military necessity as well as of humanity.”
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Dean Acheson, then assistant secretary of state for econom- ic affairs, depicted UNRRA as more than a wartime measure: it was an instrument for winning the peace, something Americans had plainly failed to do after the last world war. “It is just as important to be prepared

for the emergency that will come when the fighting is over as it is to be prepared for the victorious drives that will end in Berlin and Tokyo,” he told a radio au- dience in December 1943. “It would be a hollow vic- tory indeed that brought with it famine and disease in large parts of the world, and economic chaos that would inevitably engulf us all.” One of Acheson’s col- leagues in the State Department, Francis B. Sayre, was still more effusive. Speaking to the University Club of Boston, Sayre claimed that “never before had the peo- ples of the West and the East, the North and the South, met together to pool their resources and to organize themselves upon an international scale to help bind up the wounds of war, to assist in feeding the hungry, and to help care for the sick.” UNRRA, he said, was “a new enterprise, based fundamentally on human brother- hood.”
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Herbert H. Lehman, the governor of New York and the man Roosevelt tapped to lead the new agency, also embraced the idea that UNRRA was not merely in the soup-kitchen business. Echoing Roosevelt’s 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech, Lehman told a dinner au- dience in New York in June 1943 “that freedom from want is a basic component of any enduring peace.” He continued: “ The cry of nations and their peoples for assistance in the first hours of liberation will present democracy with a supreme test. The fate of attempts by all the United Nations to banish global wars may well

be determined by the success of their first joint action in relief and rehabilitation.”
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The early stages of UNRRA’s work quickly gave the lie to most of this inflated rhetoric. In November 1943, when UNRRA was established, Hitler and his allies still controlled most of continental Europe; not until the middle of 1944, with Anglo-American forces moving up the Italian peninsula, and into France, could UNRRA hope to swing into action. As director, Herbert Leh- man spent most of 1944 fighting bureaucratic battles in Washington and London rather than helping refu- gees. The American and British armies desired to keep their lock on all available resources, especially food, shipping, transport, and talented personnel: precisely the things UNRRA needed if it was going to be effec- tive. General Eisenhower signed an agreement with Lehman on November 25, 1944, stating that the mili- tary recognized UNRRA’s role in health, welfare, and displaced persons in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, and in former enemy territories. Yet Eisenhower proved reluctant to provide supplies, trucks, and transport to the proposed teams of UNRRA staff that were to go into the field. Not until March 1945 did UNRRA finally secure a training center in France: a rundown hotel on the Normandy coast in Granville. When SHAEF authorities did ask UNRRA to send relief

teams into Germany in the early spring of 1945, UNRRA did not yet have the supplies and personnel it needed, and repeatedly asked the Army for more, causing some exasperation in SHAEF headquarters.
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Lehman’s col- leagues in Foggy Bottom were little help: “there was a good deal of jealousy within the State Department,” Lehman later recalled, “which felt that a new man in a new bureau or division would limit their authority and opportunities for managing operations…. Everyone in Washington was fighting for power.” Lehman never re- solved the problem of resources while the war was still going on; the armed forces simply would not provide a relief organization with supplies or shipping until their work was done.
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Two additional problems faced UNRRA from the start: who would receive aid, and who would pay for it? For all the expectations of a global mission of healing and assistance, UNRRA’s charter stipulated that the agen- cy was to give aid on quite a restrictive basis only to those states that had been invaded by the Axis powers and that, at the end of the war, did not have sufficient means to pay for goods and supplies on the world mar- ket. This limited UNRRA’s scope, since France, Bel- gium, Luxembourg, Norway, and the Netherlands all technically had the national resources to pay for im- ports, while Germany and Italy, as enemy states, were

not supposed to be receiving UNRRA handouts. In fact, this formula proved much too narrow, and Italy and Germany would soon become a major part of UNRRA operations. Furthermore, UNRRA took responsibility for caring for displaced persons across Europe. But at the outset, UNRRA was restricted to a narrow band of countries in southeastern Europe: Greece, Yugoslavia, and Albania. By the spring of 1945, UNRRA began to ex- pand its efforts into liberated Eastern Europe, includ- ing Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belorussia, and Ukraine. UNRRA’s postwar work in former enemy states, Ger- many, Italy, Austria, and Hungary, was limited to the health and welfare of refugees, destitute and displaced persons, and a feeding program for children and young mothers. Thus, UNRRA was explicitly not designed to be the major institution for rebuilding Europe. For countries that had been invaded and needed help, it offered immediate relief in the form of food and cloth- ing; medical supplies and public health services; and some rehabilitation supplies such as farm equipment, seeds and fertilizers, machinery and spare parts, load- ing and docking equipment, and vehicles—the materi- als needed to get Europe’s agricultural and industrial production back into gear.