I have a chance to get this letter off on the CLARE going Wednesday, so I thought I would bring you up to date. It is really a great consolation to talk to you on Sunday nights, because as you may imagine, desperate as it is for you folks, it is much worse for me here… Also I know you will be terribly sorry to hear that Roehampton Convent has been bombed twice, and quite badly damaged. I talked with Mother Isabel also, and she told me an incendiary bomb dropped in the yard at Boxmoor, but no damage was done. It is almost impossible to meet anybody, no matter where they live, who has not had a bad experience with this bombing or who is not intimately acquainted with somebody who has suffered some loss. Jack Kennedy’s boss, Hanbury, was killed with his entire family by a bomb last Friday night. So you see there are things happening which bring this terrible mess home to one every day.
I can’t help but think of those days before Munich and all during the next year, when I deplored what this war was going to do to all of us. You will remember how often I said my real reason for not wanting England to get into a war was because of the terrible effect it would eventually have on the United States. Well, it is having that effect, and it is going to continue to have it…
As to the situation here, of course we have had acute bombings and several very disagreeable day-light raids, particularly in Bristol, Liverpool and Southampton. A great deal more damage is being done here than is given out to the Press, but the greatest danger I see is from forcing all the inhabitants of London into air-raid shelters at night where they sleep with their clothes on, sitting up, lying down—any way, and all crowded together. If we don’t have the worst epidemics of disease before this winter is thru, I’ll miss my guess. The ground is laid for some terrible results.
As far as I am concerned, I seem to be going on reasonably well. I wouldn’t know what it was not to go to bed and not hear motors droning over my head or gun fire all over the place. I ride horseback and play golf with German planes flying overhead on their way to some place, and in spite of it all I am still very well. The strain, I think, is on the mental processes rather than on the physical ones…
Well, dear, I think that is about all the news at the minute. As I said, I am planning, unless something dreadful happens, to be with you this month. I haven’t much to say for all the children, but I am sure you will tell them all the news I have written you.
All my love, darling.
Joe”
EXCERPT OF A LETTER FROM JOSEPH P. KENNEDY SR. TO ROSE