This one is just days old. On August 4, the combined operations “Aphrodite” (Army Air Force) and “Anvil” (Navy) had begun a series of planned attacks on German-controlled weapon complexes. With the program’s reliance on the earliest stages of autopilot technology, the risk factor is high and the pressure to succeed higher still.
The first six Aphrodite missions have already failed.
Now Anvil makes its first attempt.
Navy lieutenant Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. looks through the caged cockpit of his battle-weary PB4Y-1—the navy designation of the Army Air Force’s B-24 Liberator. The cargo load totals 374 fifty-five-pound boxes distributed throughout the plane. Together, they contain eleven tons of Torpex, or “torpedo explosive,” a powerful combination of RDX, TNT, and powdered aluminum.
On board with the twenty-nine-year-old pilot is radio operator and copilot Lieutenant Wilford John “Bud” Willy. He is new to Joe Jr.’s second seat, outranking and replacing Ensign James Simpson, who sends Joe off with a handshake and parting words, “So long and good luck, Joe. I only wish I were going with you.”
Surrounded by a unique protective formation of a dozen aircraft, the unmanned bomber is to be flown like a modern-day drone, continuing on a crash course over France to its target, the Fortress of Mimoyecques.
The fortress is an underground military complex that houses two dozen German V-3 superguns, long-range cannons known as the “London gun,” primed to inflict even more damage than the thirty-six thousand bomb strikes of Unternehmen Loge, the German code name for the fifty-seven-day Blitz of 1940.
The plane takes off from the airfield’s six-thousand-foot runway, leveling at an altitude of two thousand feet. The crew then must perform two crucial tasks: arm the detonators, then turn over radio navigation control to a mother PV-1 aircraft flying at twenty thousand feet. Over the English Channel, the men will bail out and await a rescue boat.
At least, that’s the plan.
* * *
The “star of our family,” is what Joe Sr. calls his eldest son. It’s no surprise that the slender, handsome, athletic, blue-eyed Harvard student—accustomed to elite education and international travel—boasts among friends about the certainty of his destiny. After graduation from Harvard College in 1938, but before starting at Harvard Law School, Joe Jr. (and later Jack) undertakes an intensive tutorial with London School of Economics professor Harold Laski.
Laski, a socialist and a Jew who instructs via the exacting Socratic method, is a seemingly unconventional mentor for Joe Sr. to choose, but when questioned on it, he says, “My opinion has always been that you don’t have to worry about the other side. We’ve got all the arguments on our side.” It’s also a test of his sons’ mettle.
Together, Joe Jr. and Laski travel to Moscow to observe in person the regime of Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party, whose name means “man of steel.” While there, Laski poses intricate questions to his pupil on world leaders and their philosophies, demanding, “What will you do about this when you are president?”
Joe Jr. had already encountered the powerful and persistent leadership style of Adolf Hitler on a 1934 trip to Munich, after which the impressionable eighteen-year-old interprets for his father a rationale for inverse power dynamics: “Hitler is building a spirit in his men that would be envied in any country…This spirit would very quickly be turned into a war spirit, but Hitler has things well under control.” Joe Jr. went on to describe the “excellent psychology”—perhaps intuited from Joe Sr.’s own anti-Semitic stance—of Hitler’s vision for “the need of the common enemy…the Jews,” though he added, “It is extremely sad, that noted professors, scientists, artists, etc. should have to suffer, but as you can see, it would be practically impossible to throw out only a part of them, from both the practical and psychological point of view.”
Six years later, however, as Joe Jr. begins his second year at Harvard Law in September 1940, America seems on the brink of war with Hitler. On the fourteenth of that month, President Roosevelt signs into law the Selective Service and Training Act, a peacetime measure to provide military instruction for up to nine hundred thousand male citizens between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six.
Joe Jr., who is ranked near the middle of his law school class of five hundred, writes to a friend about his enlistment as “one of Roosevelt’s several million numbers,” adding, “I’ve always fancied the idea of flying and I’ve never fancied the idea of crawling with rifle and bayonet through European mud.”
Concerned about the risks of airborne warfare, Joe Sr. pressures his typically obedient son to accept a desk assignment arranged through his government connections.
Joe Jr. refuses. The rebellious streak that inspires him to seek his aviator’s wings in the Navy Air Corps rather than sit safely behind a desk alarms his father, who has spent years—including while ambassador to Great Britain—railing against America joining the war.
Now Joe Jr. is on the other side.
In his seventeenth fireside chat, recorded on May 27, 1941, Roosevelt makes his case for the impending necessity of war. “It is unmistakably apparent to all of us, unless the advance of Hitlerism is forcibly checked now, the Western Hemisphere will be within range of the Nazi weapons of destruction.”
In May 1942, Joe Jr. is awarded his wings.
In September 1943, he travels with his squadron to England, where they serve alongside the British Naval Command.
“Kennedy was such a good pilot that we would have flown with him anywhere,” states Alvin T. Jones, an aviation machinist’s mate who performed many of Joe Jr.’s preflight inspections.
By that summer of 1944, Joe Jr. has successfully completed well over the twenty-five bombing missions required to complete his tour. He pushes on through D-Day, then seeks out a special assignment requiring what his brother Jack would later describe as “the most dangerous type of flying.”
Joe Jr. has been preparing for this daring flight all his life.
In the last week of July 1944, Joe pens a cryptic letter to his father. “I am going to do something different for the next three weeks,” he writes. “It is a secret and I am not allowed to say what it is, but it isn’t dangerous so don’t worry.”
“Joe, don’t tempt the fates,” his father replies. “Just come home.”
Chapter 8
Ensign John Demlein, pilot of the PV-1 mother ship, tries for a light moment on the tarmac, asking Joe if he’s all caught up with his life insurance payments.
Joe flashes a toothy Kennedy grin. “I’ve got twice as much as I need,” he says.
The day before, the lieutenant had a completely different conversation with electronics officer Lieutenant Earl Olsen. Olsen warns that faulty detonator wiring may spark an airborne explosion—and pleads with Joe to abort the mission.
“There was never an occasion for a mission that meant extra hazard that Joe did not volunteer [for],” recalls Joe Jr.’s squadron roommate, Louis Papas. “He had everyone’s unlimited admiration and respect for his courage, zeal and willingness to undertake the most dangerous missions.”
By his brother Jack’s calculations, Joe Jr. has flown “probably more combat missions in heavy bombers than any other pilot of his rank in the Navy.” Yet he’s fighting an internal war on two fronts.