The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

he was told he was going back. Aside from his normal attaché’s duties, he
was to spend time at the War Office, to which he would have access, and
travelling around the country, and then reporting back on whether he
thought Britain would prevail.
Before he went, Lee was thoroughly briefed. Kennedy, he was told, was
still being defeatist, although according to Herbert Feis, the State
Depertment Advisor, that was only because the war was lowering the stock
market and affecting the Ambassador’s securities. Nonetheless, Lee was
taken aback by how much defeatist talk there was. He felt there was a
pathological assumption that it was all over bar the shouting and that it was
too late for the United States to do anything. ‘Well, it boils down to this,’
Lee said in his briefing, ‘that the President and the State Department want
to be just as helpful to the Allies as the public opinion of this country will
permit, and the latter is changing very rapidly.’ Yes, he was told, in a
nutshell that was it.
He arrived in England on 21 June, having flown via Lisbon. London
had changed a great deal in the nine months since he had last been there,
and seemed ‘as dark as a pocket’. Many of the familiar streets now had
piles of sandbags along them, or barricades of wire. Everyone at the
Embassy seemed pleased to see him back, however, even Kennedy, who
nevertheless wasted no time in emphatically telling him that Britain was
beaten and that he was against American intervention. Lee, however, was
not going to allow himself to be swayed by the Ambassador. Rather, he
preferred to judge the situation for himself.
One person who could understand the defeatist talk in America was the
photographer Cecil Beaton. He had reluctantly left England shortly after the
German offensive had begun, full of remorse for leaving at such a time of
peril for his country, but nonetheless conscious that he had a large tax bill in
arrears and so was financially unable to turn down the £2,000 from Pond’s
Cream to take some advertising pictures for them. Since he had been away,
however, the news had grown progressively worse and worse, so that
despite the sumptuous amounts of unrationed food and the bright lights of
New York, and despite the luxury and comfort of living in a city untouched
by war, Cecil was wracked with anguish. ‘Every hour,’ he wrote, ‘the radio
bulletins told of further tragedy. Nowhere could one find solace from the