Joseph Patrick Kennedy, 50, father of nine and normally cheerful, flew from Cannes to London one day last week brimming over with gloom which had been gathering inside him for more than a year. As the official eyes, ears, head and heart of the U. S. in Great Britain, it seemed that he was at last about to behold that unspeakable spectacle which he had dreaded: totalitarian war in which women & children, the aged and the ill, civilians as well as military, orders sacred and orders profane, would all be devastated regardless. Ambassador Joe Kennedy returned to a Britain preparing for death on a scale it believed impossible to exaggerate. Yet Britain was calm, methodical, at moments almost whimsical—completely different from last September.
>London expected 100,000 air-bombing casualties per week. Some 250 big suburban busses were transformed into ambulances. Hospitals ringed the city, first-aid stations honeycombed it. But these preparations were only for a London that was to be relatively empty 48 hours after hell should erupt. Evacuation plans for all nonessential workers, for mothers & children, old people, invalids, were set and published. Beauty parlors were crammed with women seeking one last hairdo before fleeing to safety or reporting for emergency jobs.
>King George returned, hurried and hatless, from Scotland to attend Privy Council, become a quasi-dictator and stay at Buckingham Palace, beneath whose gardens were built prodigious bombproof quarters for King, retinue, servants. Queen Elizabeth and the two Princesses stayed on at Balmoral Castle, where gas masks were issued to all. Later they would go to Windsor Castle, whose rock, looming above the fabled cricket fields of Eton, was tunneled and chambered invulnerably for them and for art treasures from Buckingham Palace as well as the Castle. Queen Mary obdurately insisted on staying at Sandringham on the dangerous east coast.
>Their Majesties' friend and Great Britain's U. S. banker, John P. Morgan, called off the grouse shooting at his Scottish moor, offered his Gannochy Lodge to the nation for a hospital.
>To Ambassador Kennedy, retired U. S. Banker George Weeks (National City) offered his "Headley Park" on the downs near Epsom as a refugee embassy.
>The giant pandas, chimpanzees, orangutans and other rare animals in Regent's Park Zoo were moved to more remote Whipsnade. Plans were made to gas all snakes, shoot all dangerous animals the minute war began.
>Every evening Britain recalled Sir Edward Grey's epic lament about the lamps going out all over Europe, never again to be relit in his time. The late August moon rode alone over a darkened city whose street intersections were marked only by thin crosses cut in the black paper masking their traffic lights. Dim blue bulbs picked out busses and subway entrances. Lord Halifax, returning across Downing Street from No. 10 to the Foreign Office after a night broadcast, could not find the keyhole, had to strike matches. In Hyde Park, antiaircraft crews stood by their guns through the small hours. Frank Frewin Pinnock, 50, a London businessman arrested for reckless driving after a motor crash, pleaded "a mental blackout."