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

various Americans to get more pictures in the US press. Back in August,
Raymond Lee had urged Duff Cooper to do just this, but the Minister had
told him that he could not get the pictures released from the service
departments. On 23 September, however, Cecil Beaton’s photograph of the
three-year-old Eileen Dunne had been the front cover of Life magazine and
was accompanied by a spread of his pictures of bomb damage. It all helped.
American public opinion was changing; slowly but surely, the isolationists
were losing ground.
Certainly, the message coming from Americans in London was that
Britain was going to survive. Raymond Lee had said so in his reports, and
so too did Ed Murrow and every other US journalist in town. On 23
September, Brigadier-General George Strong gave an interview in which he
said that if the Germans invaded they would have a nasty surprise. Strong
was Chief of the Army War Plans Division and had accompanied Admiral
Ghormley on his visit to Britain – hence his views counted and were widely
reported both sides of the Atlantic. Even Ambassador Kennedy had been
forced to admit that the RAF seemed to be winning. On 17 September he
had called on Chamberlain. ‘I still think this war won’t accomplish
anything,’ Kennedy told him. ‘We are supposed to be fighting for liberty
and the result will be to turn the last of the Democrats into Socialist,
Communist or Totalitarian states.’ He had learned nothing during his time
in Britain, doggedly sticking to the same mantra – one driven by selfinterest
and excessive stubbornness. It was no wonder that both Churchill
and Roosevelt barely acknowledged him any more. ‘Kennedy,’ noted
Raymond Lee, ‘has the speculator’s smartness but also his sharp-shooting
and facile insensitivity to the great forces which are now playing like heat
lightning over the map of the world.’ How right he was, as usual.
On his travels around the coastal defences, Lee had discovered that most
soldiers seemed anxious to have a crack at the Germans. John Wilson
certainly fell into that camp, and his eagerness to play his part in defending
Britain against the enemy had been one of the reasons why he had joined
up. Originally planning to take up a place at Oriel College, Oxford, he had
since been written to and told that there was no point while the war was on,
so on 11 September he had persuaded his mother to drive him to Maidstone
and there signed up, joining a Young Soldiers Battalion. ‘We were blistered
on to another battalion called the 8th Home Defence Battalion,’ says John.