of the Second World War in September 1939, Lewis first joined the British Army Royal Engineers as an enlisted man because he was a pacifist, but still wished to aid the war effort. However, he then inexplicably sought and gained an officer's commission in an infantry battalion. In 1941 he collaborated with artists John Petts and Brenda Chamberlain on the "Caseg broadsheets". His first published book was the collection poetry Raider's Dawn and other poems (1942), which was followed up by a volume of short stories, The Last Inspection (1942). In 1942 he was sent to British India with the South Wales Borderers. Lewis' poems about his war experiences have been described as showing "his brooding over his army experiences and trying to catch and hold some vision that would illuminate its desolation with meaning" (see Ian Hamilton "Alun Lewis Selected Poetry and Prose) Lewis died on 5 March 1944, during the Burma campaign against the Imperial Japanese Army. He was found shot in the head, after shaving and washing, near the officers' latrines, and with his revolver in his hand. Alun Lewis died from his wound six hours later. A British Army court of inquiry later concluded that Lewis had tripped and that the shooting was an accident. Alun Lewis lies buried at Taukkyan War Cemetery, located near Yangon, Myanmar. Anglo-Welsh poet Dylan Thomas also wrote about the victims of Luftwaffe bombs during the Battle of Britain and about The Holocaust in his poem A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London. United States The mass slaughter and futility of World War I were so deeply ingrained upon the American people, that U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's efforts to bring the United States into the war against Nazi Germany were very unpopular. The America First Committee, of which Charles Lindbergh was the spokesman, and the Communist Party of the United States of America were both organizing protests against Roosevelt's foreign policies. Opposition to American involvement in the war vanished completely, after the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Although the Second World War is not usually thought of as a poet's war, there were American war poets. In an interview for the documentary The Muse of Fire, U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur commented that there was a great difference between the war poets of World War I and those, like