The Mail on Sunday published the photo of the first meeting between Elizabeth, then 13, and the pupil officer Philip Mountbatten, 18, which took place in 1939 at the naval academy of Dartmouth. It is a very tender image, in which one seems to see an ecstatic surprise of the teenager Lilibeth, as she was then called by her family. As Shakespeare wrote, “it is not love if it is not love at first sight”: since that day Elizabeth has never loved any other man.
Philip had been charged with escorting Elizabeth and her sister Margaret on King George VI’s visit to the academy with his wife and daughters. It was a memorable day, the beginning of a bond that lasted for 82 years. When the Royal Yacht had left the mooring, Philip had followed him on a small boat, with Elizabeth greeting him from the parapet. The then prince of Greece and Denmark embarked the following year to participate in the war in the Mediterranean against the German and Italian fleets. He participated in the landing in Sicily, in the battle of Cape Matapan and was present at the surrender of the Japanese in the Tokyo bay. Elizabeth sent him many letters: she was happy to be able to write too, as did the other girls of the auxiliary service in which she had enlisted, to her man at the front (V. SAB.)