The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (38 page)

As for who would pay for all this bounty, there was lit- tle mystery here: the only nation in the world that had the capacity to pay for such a program was the United States, just as it had bankrolled much of the Allied war effort. The budget was structured to make it appear that this was a genuinely global undertaking: a formula was devised in which member states whose countries were not invaded would contribute a sum equivalent to 1 percent of their annual income to the relief agency. In practice, of course, this meant the United States, Brit- ain, and Canada paid for almost all of the $3.9 billion of

resources UNRRA provided, with the United States cov- ering about 73 percent of the total bill and the United Kingdom about 16 percent. Canada, Australia, Brazil, South Africa, India, and New Zealand made up most of the balance, though by the time UNRRA closed down in 1947, all its members had contributed something to its operations.
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NNRA’S LEADERS WERE capable, seasoned veterans, virtually all men. Its three directors were Lehman; his successor Fiorello La Guar-

dia, former mayor of New York City; and Major General Lowell W. Rooks, former assistant chief of staff of the G-3 section of the United States Forces European The- ater (USFET). Lehman and La Guardia were steeped in New York City and state politics, and had close ties to Washington. Rooks, a veteran of administrative af- fairs during the occupation of Europe, knew the issues UNRRA faced well. The staffing of senior positions was always a problem because so many of the “good men” that Lehman needed were already claimed by other wartime duties. It was a constant complaint in the early days of the agency that they simply could not find ca- pable people. Eventually, they did find such men: men such as the Australian naval officer Commander Robert

Jackson served as senior deputy director general for two and a half years and became the operational chief of the agency; Roy F. Hendrickson, who had worked for the Combined Food Board during the war and in the War Food Administration in Washington, headed up the Bureau of Supply; a somewhat cagey Russian named Michail Menshikov was named head of the Bu- reau of Areas, and was obviously in close contact with Moscow about UNRRA policies; Francis B. Sayre, a for- mer assistant secretary of state, high commissioner to the Philippines, and senior adviser to the the State De- partment’s Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations (OFRRO), served as diplomatic adviser; and Fred K. Hoehler, who had worked for OFRRO in North Africa, held the job of director of the Displaced Persons Division. In addition to Washington-based staff, UNRRA had a European Regional Office, based in London, headed by Lieutenant- General Sir Humphrey Gale, who had been the chief administrative officer for SHAEF. In short, these were experienced, war-tested men who knew how to operate inside large bureaucra- cies.

Whatever the talents of its senior staff, UNRRA would be judged by the capabilities and resourcefulness of its people on the ground, thousands of people from various walks of life who volunteered to serve as the

front-line troops of the world relief organization. The staff of the agency was divided into three classes: Class I were those hired for international employment, and might be posted anywhere. By December 1945, UNRRA had hired nearly 10,000 such people; 31 percent were Americans, 34 percent were British, 10 percent were French. Of the Class I staff, 2,500 worked in Washington or London in administrative jobs, and the rest were in the field—4,000 working in displaced persons opera- tions, mostly in Germany, and the rest scattered across the globe. In Europe, Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia had the largest UNRRA personnel contingent. Class II staff were local employees, hired for service in their own countries, and their local skills and knowledge were essential. Almost 2,000 Greeks worked for UNRRA by December 1945, as did over 2,500 Italians, and 300 Yu- goslavs. Class III personnel were volunteers attached to private voluntary relief organizations, supervised but not salaried by UNRRA.
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Many of these volunteers were women. Despite the dangerous conditions in which UNRRA staff worked, humanitarian relief was still considered the preserve of women, at least at the point of delivery. By mid-1946, 42 percent of UNRRA’s employees were women, and that number increased to 45 percent by the end of 1946. At that time, over 1,800 women were working for UNRRA’s

DP operations inside Germany, staffing camps and health centers; 242 were then in Greece and 181 were in Italy. Francesca Wilson, a Briton and an early UNRRA employee, had served in wartime relief during the First World War. Her motives for joining are plain enough from her memoir, written just after her return from service in Europe: she believed she could help others, and that her labor in Europe was part of a continental project to restore European civilization. She dedicated her book to the Liberal historian-journalists J. L. Ham- mond and Barbara Hammond, and it speaks in the tone of socialist egalitarianism that the Hammonds, and many others in progressive circles, would have recog- nized. Sent into Germany to work on the repatriation of displaced persons, she “felt exhilarated by being with so many Europeans who had worked to be free—and were now not only free but with something exciting to do ahead: to liberate their own and others’ countries deportees from enemy territory.” Yet she seemed to have contempt for the other Britons she encountered in UNRRA: “Most of the British recruits were retired Army officers. They had been retired because of age or health, and some looked death’s-heads.” Wilson her- self was a formidable figure: no-nonsense, disciplined, hardworking, rail-thin, tight-lipped and zealous in carrying out her duty, which she saw quite plainly as restoring humanity and order to a world that had been

destroyed not just by the Nazis but by all armed, vio- lent men.

All the staff passed through the training center at Gran- ville, in Normandy, France, en route to being posted to villages, towns, and DP camps across Europe. But Wilson scorned what she saw as an old-school, im- perial type of British officer that seemed prevalent in UNRRA ranks: “Sitting in the lounge of the bar of the Hotel Normandie, one heard many nostalgic sto- ries about the Regiment, the Northwest Frontier, and Poona, and one wondered how they would get on with Polish and Russian ‘natives’ in Germany.” UNRRA, Wil- son claimed, “was suffering at this time, more than it did later on, from its misfits. Relief work, even when it is unpaid, does not attract only the charitable—it has special charms for adventurers, tired of the sameness and restricted opportunities of life at home…. Their presence in UNRRA in the early days, even though their proportion to the whole was not large, did harm to its mission and made the military skeptical of its ef- ficiency and chary of calling in its aid.”
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Yet perhaps it was not just the adventurers in UNRRA’s ranks that made the Army uneasy about this new agency. Wilson herself had a short fuse around military men and was not afraid to let her feelings show. “I hate the army,” she found herself shouting at an American lieutenant

after he had ordered a large band of DPs moved with- out notice. “ Why don’t you go and fight someone? Why do you meddle with civilians, with peaceable human beings? They are counters to you—you think you can move mothers and babies and sick people as you move companies and batteries in the war. Why don’t you stick to something you understand?” A revealing com- ment: while the Army saw UNRRA as meddlesome and naïve, UNRRA staff often saw the Army as a behemoth, ruthless, insensitive to human needs.

Mrs. Rhoda Dawson Bickerdike, a Briton, joined UNRRA without having any experience in relief work, yet still marveled at its amateur quality. The training facilities at Granville in Normandy were terribly shabby; her ac- commodations were located in an old school building, where “the lavatory accommodation is on the Chinese pattern, a hole with stands for the feet, except for 2 or 3 WCs with proper doors which are either nailed up or used by the men. Even the French people complain.” (The latter comment reveals the frequently expressed contempt of Britons for French standards of cleanli- ness.) The food at the training center was poor and one had to wait for over an hour in line at each meal. Mean- while, their training consisted of classroom lectures. “ The presiding genius [at Granville] is an odd little personality called Arnold Forster, artist, international

figure, linguist, a friend of [former League of Nations high commissioner for refugees Fridtjof ] Nansen who has worked at Geneva a good deal, from Oxford and Chelsea, Paris, Budapest, Oslo, and all the rest…. He lectured us in two languages from morning to night…. In the intervals between standing in queues at meals, complaining about the lavatories, trying to soothe the indignant newcomers by telling them how much worse it was when we arrived, we sat at Forster’s feet and absorbed details of the work before us.” Most of this training proved totally useless in the DP camps of cen- tral Europe; but as a period of initiation, it served to set out the terms of UNRRA’s mission in the language of humanitarian, progressive one-worldism that UNRRA workers shared. And like Francesca Wilson, Mrs. Bick- erdike developed a good deal of cynicism toward her naïve American colleagues. One of the first people she met in France was an American doctor: “like all Ameri- cans, he is deeply grieved and disappointed that all his good actions do not at once produce in Europe an af- fectionate response. He does not understand that to be American is not enough; that to be beneficent is not enough; that above all to be efficient in an inefficient country is not a way to be popular.” And inevitably, the sheer weight of American wealth struck her as simply too much of a good thing. She even complained about eating American rations while on the road in Germany:

“ Two days’ lunch on the perfect US Emergency pack containing cheese, biscuit, fudge, chocolate, chewing gum, cigarettes, matches, and tinned rice pudding and peaches and orangeade powder and I could scream. I eat it but I could scream: it’s too perfect, too luxurious, too rich and far too sweet. I long to see a plain quiet Englishman and some plain English chocolate.”
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Other UNRRA employees were motivated by a strong personal and spiritual imperative to help. Isabel Need- ham, a young American nurse and a Quaker, wrote a short letter while in Italy that started “ Why did I join UNRRA? The simplest answer is because I knew that if I weren’t here, I’d want to be.” She was drawn to UNRRA for two reasons: “First, I believe in any undertaking, large or small, which offers help where help is needed. Secondly, I am a pacifist, deeply convinced not only of the value but of the imperative need of international co- operation in constructive directions.” Ms. Needham’s profile was typical for many UNRRA staff. Born in 1914, she earned a degree at Skidmore College and went into nursing and social work. In 1938, she joined a summer program called the Student Peace Service in Pennsylva- nia, and became a Quaker. The following year, she was invited by the American Friends Service Committee to direct a camp in southern France for Spanish refugee children who were fleeing the civil war. She was the

perfect kind of recruit for UNRRA, which she joined in 1944: experienced, tested, and deeply committed to hu- man welfare. She started out in the Yugoslav DP camps outside of Cairo, and then was transferred to southern Italy while awaiting a posting in Yugoslavia. It was hard work, and like so many other relief workers in postwar Europe, she found deep spiritual satisfaction in it. She expressed this commitment in the following words: “In quiet moments, my spirit reaches up, outside of me, be- yond me, with a prayer felt rather than spoken: That I may use those gifts I have to do my best in the work that is ahead; that I may be patient and courageous in times of apparent failure; that I may be sensitive to need, and understanding toward all; and that even the humblest service be done in God’s name.”
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Sometimes this sort of spiritual quest could become a burden for UNRRA, which after all faced many ugly, pedestrian chores that required shortcuts, compro- mise, and the occasional bending of the rules. A nurs- ing student from the University of New Mexico, Marie Pope Wallis, signed up for UNRRA work in 1945. She was a devoted Christian Scientist, and found herself quite unprepared for the work that lay ahead in Eu- rope. She arrived in London in July 1945, and spent six weeks in casual UNRRA training; her diary suggests her days were filled chiefly with visits to the theater.

In late August she was shipped to Normandy and the UNRRA training center at Granville, where she bunked on cots with other recruits, three to a room. Not un- til early September was she sent forward into Belgium and then Germany through devastated countryside and cityscape. The Germans she found “sullen and hostile,” and the atmosphere—women could not be unaccom- panied on the streets—fearful. In Hamburg, she found a Christian Scientist reading room and was able to ex- press her thoughts to her diary: “I get so fed up with corruption, confusion, and irresponsibility that I think I’d like to give up and go home, then I remember that I am here where I can let my light shine out in this rag- ing chaos. ‘ Thy Will be Done.’” Her first duties in Ham- burg were to register and sort out 134 orphans from Riga, forgotten in the hold of a ship in the Baltic and found by the British army. But within a few weeks, the “persistent evil suggestions of graft, inefficiency, dis- honesty, intolerance, drinking, etc.,” brought her very low. By late September she decided that she wasn’t cut out for the work of “cleaning or mopping up European tag-ends.” She found UNRRA full of “ill-prepared and unscrupulous people” who were faced with sorting out “the dregs” of Europe’s displaced. “Good personnel are being wasted and the poor ones are feathering their nests with black-market profits…. What a mad, arti- ficial business!” On the first of October, she resigned

from UNRRA.
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UNRRA was not perfect. It was indeed beset by inef- ficiency, bad planning, shortages, and frequently dubi- ous personnel. Yet these faults must not be overstated. Placed in context, UNRRA’s work in delivering aid, food, and medicine and in repairing the bridges between shattered Europe and the rest of the world was a vital stage on the path toward recovery. Its successes were modest but in certain locations—especially in south- eastern Europe—UNRRA helped transform the end of the war into a genuine liberation, helping to bring about FDR’s “freedom from want.” UNRRA worked best where it arrived early, had a large staff, and received support from the local government. This was the case in Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia, the scene of a number of enduring triumphs.