Jack, who joined the navy himself in September 1941, proudly declares, “Any man who may be asked in this century what he did to make his life worthwhile, I think can respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction, ‘I served in the United States Navy.’”
Though his first duty is deskside in a Washington, DC, intelligence post arranged by his sister Kathleen, by August 1943 Jack Kennedy is a naval war hero.
In a sibling rivalry marked by one-upmanship, by Joe’s calculations, he has fallen behind. “My congrats on the [navy and marine] medal,” he writes his younger brother after Jack is honored for facing down enemy combatants. Joe can’t resist taking a dig at the same time, adding, “To get anything out of the Navy is deserving of a campaign medal in itself.”
“It was involuntary. They sank my boat,” Jack says self-deprecatingly of his heroics in saving the surviving crew after his gunship PT-109 was rammed by Japanese destroyer Amagiri in the South Pacific.
Yet despite all of Joe Jr.’s heroic airborne missions, not once has he ever directly engaged the German foe. He’ll have little to show for his risk-taking, Joe concludes. “It looks like I shall return home with the European campaign medal if I’m lucky.”
* * *
The August 12, 1944, mission proceeds according to plan. Eighteen minutes in, the autopilot is set and the plane makes its first remote-controlled turn. Willy removes the safety, and the explosive goes live. Joe radios the code phrase “Spade Flush,” signaling that the final task before bailout is complete. The aircraft formation passes over New Delight Wood, near the town of Blythburgh, a hundred miles north of London and four miles from the North Sea.
Two loud booms shatter the airspace. The sky erupts in flames and swirling black smoke. Aircraft debris plunges toward earth, scattering for more than a mile and a half in each direction.
“Spade Flush” prove to be Joe’s last words. He and Bud are killed instantly. “Nothing larger than a basketball could have survived the blast,” Commander James Smith observes, based on his vantage point in an observation aircraft.
Lieutenant David McCarthy of the Eighth Combat Camera Unit witnesses the horror through his airborne camera.
“[The plane] just exploded in mid-air as we neared it and I was knocked halfway back to the cockpit. A few pieces of the Baby [drone] came through the plexiglass nose and I got hit in the head and caught a lot of fragments in my right arm. I crawled back to the cockpit and lowered the wheels so that [we] could make a quick emergency landing.”
Another eyewitness, Mick Muttitt, then a local schoolboy, shares his memories with ITV News: “As it passed there was a trail of smoke coming from the weapons bay and then it exploded in an enormous fireball. And I vividly remember the engines continuing in the line of flight with the propellers still turning with trails of smoke from each one. It happened more than a mile and a half away but it still knocked the plaster off our ceiling. The next day my brother and I biked to Five Fingers heath and collected bits of wreckage.”
The faulty wiring that Lieutenant Olsen detected proves to be the cause of the disaster. Subsequent investigations suggest a camera lacking an electrical shield may have set off an electromagnetic relay that tripped the detonator. One officer who saw the circuit board before the flight describes it as “something you’d make with a number two Erector set and Lincoln Logs.”
Colonel Elliott Roosevelt—one of FDR’s sons, and younger brother to James Roosevelt—was on board a Mosquito plane in the supporting formation and narrowly escaped the deadly explosion that killed Lieutenants Kennedy and Willy.
Decades later, in 1986, Elliott Roosevelt’s son gives an interview to the Boston Herald, refuting a German newspaper’s alternate version of Joe’s death. According to Bild am Sonntag, antiaircraft officer Karl Heinz Wehn witnessed Joe Jr. survive the crash and parachute into woods, then be captured by soldiers of the 12th German Panzer Division and shot by SS troopers. During the interrogation, Wehn claims, one of the two captured aviators identified himself as “Joe Kennedy.”
“If he [Wehn] says he interrogated Joe Kennedy Jr., I think he’s dreaming,” Elliott Roosevelt Jr. says. “He was never shot down. The plane exploded before it left the English coast.”
Unfortunately for the Allies, not one of the fourteen Aphrodite or Anvil missions ever hit its intended target, and the “program killed more American airmen than it did Nazis.” According to the author and US Air Force veteran Jack Olsen, Joe Jr.’s target in France wouldn’t even have mattered, as it “had been abandoned by Hitler’s missile men three months earlier.” In January 1945, General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, US commander of Strategic Air Forces in Europe, orders the operation scrapped.
Joe Jr. and Lieutenant Willy are posthumously honored for their valor with the Air Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Navy Cross.
The Cross, with its combat distinction, is a higher honor than the non-combat Navy Marine Corps Medal awarded to Jack.
Even in death, Joe Jr.’s military accomplishments outshine his brother’s. And Joe Sr. makes sure everyone knows it.
Chapter 9
On a Sunday afternoon in August 1944, two priests from the local parish knock on the door of the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port.
“[My] son was missing in action and presumed lost,” Rose remembers them telling her. Joe Jr.’s plane had gone down the day before.
Reeling in shock, she runs upstairs to wake Joe Sr. from a nap.
“We sat with the priests in the smaller room off the living room, and from what they told us we realized there could be no hope…our son was dead.”
“Joe went out on the porch and told the children. They were stunned. He said they must be brave: that’s what their brother would want from them.”
Jack corroborates his father’s attitude. “Joe would not want us to stay around here crying, so let’s go sailing,” Rose’s nephew Joe Gargan recalls Jack telling his younger siblings. According to the historian and sailor James W. Graham, they venture out on the family sailboat, Victura.
Joe Sr. retreats to his bedroom. He plays Beethoven on the turntable, despite his longtime concerns that love of classical music is a sign of weakness in a man. Not now, not at this moment.
Rose’s only consolation is her Catholic faith. For many weeks, she retreats to her room, with only a rosary for solace.
Weeks later, a final letter from Joe Jr. arrives at Hyannis Port. The sight of the familiar handwriting plunges his father into the depths of sorrow.
Then another letter arrives. A naval lieutenant who attended Harvard with Joe Jr. offers comfort and consolation. “Through Joe’s courage and devotion to what he thought was right, a great many lives have been saved.”
Joe Sr. vows not to let his dream of a Kennedy son rising to the Oval Office die along with Joe Jr.
Kathleen channels her family identity into coping with the loss of her big brother, best friend, and champion. “Luckily, I am a Kennedy,” she writes. “I have a very strong feeling that that makes a big difference about how to take things. I saw Daddy and Mother about Joe and I know that we’ve all got the ability not to be got down. There are lots of years ahead and lots of happiness left in the world though sometimes nowadays that’s hard to believe.”