Allan A. Michie put the war in context
Allan A. Michie’s home in the fall of 1940 — temporary as always — was a 17th-century brownstone in Bloomsbury that he shared with fellow Time and Life correspondent Walter Graebner.
On the night of Sept. 18, Michie was walking home from dinner in the West End when German bombs began falling. He raced for the house, then upstairs, where he planned to change clothes before heading down for what was shaping up to be a long night in the house’s improvised basement shelter.
I had changed into old trousers, wool shirt and leather jacket and was standing in the fourth-floor bathroom when, without the usual bomb-swishing sound of warning, there came a terrific explosion in the square at the front of the house. I stood transfixed as the whole house swayed crazily. My brain kept shouting to get downstairs before the next one dropped but for some reason I persisted in going through the mechanical motions of flushing the toilet, buttoning my trousers and putting out the bathroom light before I finally ran down to the third floor.
I grabbed my typewriter and paper from the hall table and remember hearing the housekeeper cry over the phone to her husband: ‘Something’s happening to our house. I’ve got to go.’ Before she could hang up the receiver the second explosion came. The blast blew in the hall window and blackout paper wrapped itself around me as I was blown rump over teakettle into the kitchen, falling over Graebner’s cocker spaniel Bepi. The housekeeper was blown into the dining room as the huge window in the living room came tumbling down and the electric fireplace was flung across into the bookcase on the other side of the room.
I scrambled to my feet, rushed into the dining room and dragged the housekeeper back into the kitchen where she lay flat on the floor for safety. I thought we were finished. Planks, bricks and glass, blown into the air by the explosion, came tumbling down on the house through the windows and roof and clouds of smoke and bomb fumes rolled into the rooms. After what seemed eternity, the crashing stopped and we heard Graebner’s voice through the darkness.
Michie’s account of his close call appeared in the Sept. 30, 1940 edition of Life, structured as a dialogue in which he and Graebner took turns narrating the events of the evening. It was just one in a series of fascinating accounts the correspondent turned out across the duration of the war, including articles in several magazines and six books.
Allan Andrew Michie was born July 4, 1915 near Aberdeen, Scotland. He moved to the United States with his family as a child, and they eventually settled in Menasha, Wisconsin.
After graduating from nearby Ripon College in 1936, Michie embarked on a seven-week tour of Europe — a preview of what was to come over the ensuing decade for a man who would be on the move throughout the coming war. His first stop was the United Kingdom, where he traveled by bicycle from Southampton to Aberdeen.
Michie would take a steamer across the channel to Holland, bicycling through Belgium and into France. He did not enjoy the “insolent French people” he encountered in Paris and quickly made his way to Germany, where he would spend the final two and a half weeks of his journey aside for a brief pass through Switzerland.
The 21-year-old’s first-person account of his journey ran in several Wisconsin newspapers after his late-August return home. It included this passage:
Naturally, one hears nothing against the Hitler regime in Germany. The people are not allowed to talk, or even to think for themselves. The Hitler movement is essentially a youth movement. Every boy and girl is a member of the Hitler Jugend and the Band of German Girls. In my conversations with them I found no one who thought for himself — they all repeated parrot-like phrases that they had learned from their propaganda books — ‘Germany diplomacy good, English diplomacy not good; German soldiers good, English and American soldiers not good.’ …
All the young people are Hitler fanatics — the older generations seem to realize that it is a youth movement and that there is no place for them in it. Therefore, they accept it but make no comment either way.
While noting that Hitler’s power base was in Munich and greater Bavaria, Michie predicted the deeply Catholic region would eventually prove a stumbling block as his regime chipped away at organized religion.
After surveying the effects of the movement in Germany one is inclined to evaluate it as a surface movement, destined to run into serious consequences once it uproots the deeper threads of the lives of the people.
There young Michie underestimated Hitler and his supporters, and he would spend several years to come chronicling the devastation the Nazis spread across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Michie spent a year in law school at the University of Chicago before deciding to focus on journalism. He landed a job on the foreign desk at Time and moved to New York in the summer of 1937.
With trouble brewing in Europe two years later, he sailed for England days after Germany invaded Poland, beginning an around-the-world odyssey that would consume much of the next six years.
In addition to covering the conflict for his employers, he cranked out a series of wartime books that chronicled the fighting. The first two, Their Finest Hour and Lights of Freedom, were co-written with Graebner.
He then penned four more on his own: Every Man to His Post, Retreat to Victory, The Air Offensive Against Germany and Keep the Peace Through Air Power.
Retreat to Victory, published in the summer of 1942, may have been the most ambitious. An offshoot of his experience covering the British Army fighting in the Middle East for Time, the book helped contextualize those retreats from Dunkirk and Crete that Americans had grown accustomed to reading about in newspapers. The Sydney Morning Herald called the book “a triumph of common-sense reporting” designed to help Americans in particular form a more positive opinion of British troops and leaders.
Around this time, Michie jumped from Time and Life to Reader’s Digest, where he served as a roving correspondent through the early 1950s. He kept cranking out books along the way, though only one would revisit the war: The Invasion of Europe, an account of D-Day published a few months after the 20th anniversary of the Normandy landings.
Michie eventually moved into the non-profit sector in the late 1960s and in the fall of 1971 moved to Philadelphia to become vice president of public affairs for the Academy of Natural Sciences.
Michie had been in that job for a little over two years when he died of a heart attack at his home on Veterans Day, 1973. He was 58 years old.