As Britain starts to extricate itself from Europe’s embrace, it is timely to examine the intricacies of this love-hate relationship at another point of crisis. Last Hope Island describes the many continental Europeans who, escaping Nazi occupation, found refuge in Britain during the second world war. Their stories are exciting, moving and horrifying, with foreign monarchs, spies, scientists and soldiers attempting to continue their battles from a vulnerable island that did not appear well placed to resist the probable German invasion.

Lynne Olson, an American historian, has written many books about the war, and her clear-eyed prose challenges popular myths about Britain’s “finest hour”. She explores the remarkable bravery and ingenuity of these exiled European allies, but there are enough British failures and betrayals to make for hard, even upsetting reading. Although it is a brick of a book with a daunting number of subjects, it skips along, focusing on the vibrant personalities and their extraordinary stories.

King Haakon VII of Norway was known to his people as “Mr King” for his egalitarian approach. Hitler was infuriated by the initial defiance of “this ridiculously small country and its petty king!” After dramatic car chases, and being strafed by German planes through glacier-bound central Norway, the tall, thin 67-year-old reluctantly fled his country with tons of Norway’s gold reserves and wound up in London. Just as democratic in character and equally passionate about her people was Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. “I fear no man in the world but Queen Wilhelmina,” Churchill quipped. Both monarchs relished informality and played crucial roles in their nations’ wartime affairs. They took to broadcasting popular messages of resistance from the BBC, whose rapid transformation from stuffy and insular to multilingual beacon of liberty occupies a fascinating chapter of this book. As Haakon arrived there to speak, the receptionist asked, “Sorry, dear – where did you say you were king of?”

Olson resents the British failure to acknowledge the key role Polish scientists played in breaking the Enigma code

Olson has written about Polish fighter pilots in Britain in another book, A Question of Honor, and describes the disdainfully xenophobic mistrust of the British towards the 8,000 Polish airmen (and 20,000 soldiers). Before long, however, the pilots’ bravery and military successes were appreciated, as was their flirtatious hand-kissing. London was a city that didn’t forgo cocktail parties or romancing, even when the bombs were dropping, as described so well in Lara Feigel’s The Love-charm of Bombs and Matthew Sweet’s The West End Front. Like the Polish General Sikorski, the Czech President Beneš was given asylum, even if he was downgraded from a fancy palace in Prague to a boring bungalow in Putney. The British government, having ordered Beneš not to fight, then blamed him for giving in to Hitler too easily. While the Nazis continued their atrocities in Prague, the Czech president was practically ignored and consistently humiliated in London.

Among the most enticing characters in the book is the dashingly piratical Charles Howard, 20th Earl of Suffolk. Bearded, tattooed and with a penchant for ivory-handled pistols, champagne and suites at the Ritz, he also had a serious background in science. He rescued from occupied Norway enough canisters of “something called heavy water” to delay Nazi development of nuclear bombs – the haul was hidden in Wormwood Scrubs prison, then Windsor Castle. The earl rescued scientists from France as well and later progressed to dismantling bombs, eventually being blown up and leaving no trace but his silver cigarette case.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winston Churchill, left, and Charles de Gaulle at the Armistice Day celebrations in Paris, 1944. Photograph: Popperfoto

There are few war stories more beloved in Britain than the thrilling exploits of the SOE – from W Stanley Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight, about the audacious abduction of a Nazi general on Crete, to Rick Stroud’s recent Lonely Courage, which describes the astonishing bravery of female secret agents and wireless operators. After being parachuted into France, these women’s life expectancy was around six weeks. Olson does not pull her punches in underlining why, accusing the SOE of incompetence and carelessness, at least for its first three years. Recruiting largely from the clubby old-boy network, it sent poorly trained agents abroad and failed to protect them. London officials did not notice the missing double checks in wireless operators’ messages – a sign they were captured. Instead, they radioed reminders to use the double check, enabling the Gestapo to use their prisoners as decoy ducks and repeatedly scoop up more agents on subsequent drops. More than 50 Dutch agents sent from London were caught like this and eventually executed, hundreds of tons of arms were seized and the Dutch resistance movement was decimated. SOE records on this debacle “disappeared in a fire”.

British officials lacked understanding in other ways. When Czech resistance leaders begged London to cancel an operation to assassinate the Nazi “butcher of Prague” Reinhard Heydrich, nothing was done. The backlash was a two-week bloodbath killing 5,000 citizens. Churchill’s memoirs omitted to mention the British part in this operation; it was far from being the only horrific case of Nazi revenge on civilians.

The Love-charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel – review Read more

Though it is full of stirring stories, the lasting interest of Last Hope Island is its cool reckoning of history, away from the heat of bombs and battles. Olson is an outsider with a keen sense of justice; she resents, for instance, the British failure to acknowledge the fundamental role Polish scientists played in breaking much of the Enigma code before the war. They were not allowed to work at Bletchley Park and afterwards were consistently denied their glory. We all know about Alan Turing; how many have heard of Marian Rejewski? At the end of the war, the Poles were sacrificed to realpolitik; left to be slaughtered by the SS, they were then abandoned to the Soviets and barred from London’s 1946 victory parade of 30 allied nations.

De Gaulle drove Churchill bonkers in London during the war with his haughtiness, arrogance and insistence that he was a man of destiny. His memoirs describe Churchill shouting at him that Britain would always choose the US and the “open seas” over Europe. Although Churchill backed De Gaulle after liberation and spoke at his Paris rally, such an attitude resounds across the decades and now haunts us. Olson analyses the development of the EU (from the Benelux Treaty onwards) as a marriage brokered out of the horrors of warfare and occupation and the determination to avoid it ever happening again. Even after all they had been through with their European friends in wartime London, the British were still standoffish enough to want to make Britain great again by themselves. They rejected the idea of a European federation, changed their minds about entry to the EEC when they saw its trading successes, were blocked for 11 years by a resentful De Gaulle, and finally joined, when the rules had already been established without them.