On June 13, desperate for a counteroffensive but still awaiting deployment of von Braun’s V-2 (which needed one more round of testing), the German High Command ordered V-1 flying bombs launched against Britain from sites near Pas-de-Calais, on France’s north-central coast, east of the Normandy landings. The V-1—a relative of the V-2 in name and provenance only—was tested by a separate group at Peenemünde. The V-1 was a far less complex weapon, essentially a pilotless 1940s jet with a simple autopilot to regulate altitude and airspeed. Between June and September 1944, more than eight thousand of these “buzz bombs,” or “Doodlebugs” (so called for the sound of their pulse-jet engines), were launched against London, flying at around 450 miles per hour and packed with a ton of high explosives. Though dubbed one of the Reich’s Vergeltungswaffen (vengeance weapons), the V-1 sometimes failed, suffering from frequent malfunctions and guidance errors and being fairly vulnerable to Allied defensive measures, including fighter planes and barrage balloons. Even V-1s that hit their targets sometimes failed to detonate, leaving giant unexploded bombs to be unearthed in Greater London years and even decades later. Overall, only about a quarter of the V-1s launched against England between June and October 1944 hit their targets, but with more than one hundred coming in daily during the peak of Germany’s offensive, those that did get through created massive destruction. And the V-1 diverted a lot of Allied resources into the defense of London. For months, Allied planes were kept busy intercepting them in midair while military aviators and the U.S. Army Air Corps tried desperately to locate and destroy V-1 launch sites on the Continent.
With as many as a quarter of Britain’s air assets dedicated to fighting the V-1s, it was the Allies’ turn to rush untried technology into battle. Aware that the Germans had another secret weapon on the docket, General Eisenhower was eager to knock out the underground Mittelwerk V-2 manufacturing facility in the Harz Mountains in central Germany. The Allied planners, however, erroneously believed that launching the V-2 would require some kind of large, stationary pipe or cannon along the French coast. The most daunting such location was a heavily fortified hill compound in northeastern France called Mimoyecques. American bombers had attacked that complex several times, killing hundreds and inflicting damage, yet the shrouded work there continued unabated. U.S. intelligence reports identified the Nazi complex as a massive bunker protecting a series of tunnels and cavelike workshops. One agent reported that he’d heard from a source that “a concrete chamber was to be built near one of the tunnels for the installation of a tube, 40 to 50 meters long [131 to 164 feet], which he referred to as a ‘rocket launching cannon.’” Presuming that Mimoyecques would be the V-2’s major launch site, American intelligence officers in London searched for an innovative way to obliterate the facility. (In truth, the Mimoyecques hill hid yet another secret German weapon: the V-3, a long-range gun that would, according to its designers, be capable of firing large-scale explosives on London at a rate of five shells per minute, around the clock. The Nazis were building fifty of these V-3s at Mimoyecques.)
Allied intelligence also learned that von Braun, following his V-2 success on October 3, 1942, was designing the world’s first transatlantic ballistic missile, which Hitler wanted to use to obliterate New York, Boston, and Washington. The SS called the effort Projekt Amerika. U.S. Army general Henry “Hap” Arnold was extremely worried that this cruise missile, if properly developed, meant the Atlantic Ocean was no longer an effective barrier protecting America’s Eastern Seaboard from Europe. “Someday, not too far distant,” Arnold wrote, “there can come streaking out of somewhere (we won’t be able to hear it, it will come so fast) some kind of a gadget with an explosive so powerful that one projectile will be able to wipe out completely this city of Washington.”
Soon after V-1s began to rain down on Great Britain early that summer, Mimoyecques became a prime target for Allied bomber pilots. American commanders operating out of England, believing that they were attacking the V-1 compound and unfinished big-gun complex before it could be fully operational, approved a daring plan, Operation Aphrodite, to destroy the facility and other related rocketry sites in France. To realize the secret bombing raid, Eisenhower needed experienced U.S. pilots and B-17 and B-24 bombers that had reached the end of their military service but wanted one last dangerous mission.
On the home front that June, Jack Kennedy became the talk of the town when “Survival,” John Hersey’s piece about PT-109, appeared in The New Yorker (rather than Life, as originally planned). The article came to play a seminal role in Kennedy’s life. After an arm-twisting campaign by Joseph Kennedy Sr., Reader’s Digest agreed to reprint the heroic tale, delivering it to what was then the country’s largest magazine readership. Later, Joseph Sr. would privately publish the story in pamphlet form, for free distribution. The historian John Hellmann observed that the article began the “construction of John F. Kennedy as a public image of fiction-like, even mythic, resonance.”
Kennedy’s PT service was emblematic of two heroic archetypes of the times: young Ivy League men of distinction, and harrowing military action in the Pacific Theater. Jack fit the bill, but so did most, if not all, of the other men who commanded the mosquito boats. William White wrote a wartime best seller, They Were Expendable, about the heroic 1942 exploits of Medal of Honor winner Lieutenant John D. Bulkeley on PT-41 in the Pacific. Even before the war was over, They Were Expendable was produced as a movie starring the sought-after actor Robert Montgomery, who had himself been a decorated PT boat commander. In the popular imagination, the men of the PT boats were like the flying aces of World War I, whose stories were always told with dash and glamour, never mind the grim realities. In a naval war that was essentially fought between hulking battleships carrying thousands of sailors, the mythos of the PT boat sailors appealed to the American ideal of the independent, maverick hero.
Kennedy’s steel-eyed courage in leading the survivors of the PT-109 to safety elevated him above even other PT officers. Exuding grit, quick thinking, and endurance, Jack had valued the lives of others more than his own. Virtually overnight following the publication of “Survival,” Kennedy went from being a published author and spoiled child of privilege to a naval version of U.S. Army hero Audie Murphy. “I firmly believe,” Kennedy wrote years later, “that as much as I was shaped by anything, so I was shaped by the hand of fate moving in World War II.”
Just as the Reader’s Digest article was about to appear that August of 1944, twenty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Joe Kennedy Jr. was in a highly enviable position as a U.S. pilot based in England. Having completed his twenty-fifth mission, he was entitled to return home. Instead, he bravely volunteered as a pilot in Operation Aphrodite, the effort to target supposed German V-1 missile facilities and other fortified Nazi compounds in France. Some have suggested that it was brother Jack’s emergence as a Pacific war hero that prompted Joe Jr.’s determination to make his own heroic name. The timing supports that theory, and certainly the brothers were fiercely competitive, but the idea doesn’t hold up. In the first place, Aphrodite (named after the butterfly, not the Greek goddess) was a secret of the first magnitude, utilizing risky technology that couldn’t be discussed for the duration of the war. The pilots who volunteered didn’t do so for fame and glory. Second, as a pilot who had flown twenty-five missions, Joe Jr. would already have been regarded as a military hero wherever he went in the United States.
Joe Jr. was a multifaceted character, impossible to simplify in any aspect, but his thinking was probably similar to that of the other experienced B-17 Liberator and B-24 Flying Fortress pilots who volunteered for Aphrodite: if they could destroy targets such as the secret Nazi base at Mimoyecques before the Germans mass-produced weapons developed there, thus helping to hasten Allied victory in the war, then it was worth the personal risk. But Joe Jr. soon learned that there was a novel, frightening new aspect to Operation Aphrodite: his specially configured Liberator would need pilots only for takeoff. Once aloft, he and his copilot woul
d throw switches, surrendering their Liberator to remote control from a nearby mother ship, and activate a detonator wired to twenty-five thousand pounds of Torpex explosives, 1.7 times more powerful than TNT. If all went well, they’d parachute out, leaving the Liberator, now a kind of drone aircraft, to fly onward under remote control to crash into the mouth of the caves and bunkers at Mimoyecques.
Naval Air Corps pilots recruited for Operation Aphrodite realized the extreme danger they’d face. In addition to requiring that they fly planes packed with nearly twice the explosive charge they normally carried, Aphrodite was hastily organized. The planes’ interiors, for example, were so completely stripped and remodeled that pilots were confused by their surroundings, even in the cockpit. Expertise with a B-17 or B-24 was almost a liability on the high-risk mission, not an asset, because nothing in the Liberator was quite where it was supposed to be.
Lieutenant Joe Kennedy Jr. and his copilot, Lieutenant Wilford “Bud” Willy—a handsome athletic type from Fort Worth, Texas, who was the executive officer of Special Air Unit One—took off on August 12 in a converted B-24 Liberator. This was the U.S. Navy’s first Aphrodite mission. With the weather cooperating and hearts pounding, they reached the designated altitude of two thousand feet, flying over the English countryside and headed toward the French coast. The bull’s-eye target of Mimoyecques wasn’t far away. According to plan, Kennedy and Willy switched their dronelike Liberator to remote-control mode and began arming the fuses, but they never got to bail out. Death pounced on them: an explosion shredded the plane ten minutes before the planned bailout, killing Kennedy and Willy instantly. A Naval Air Corps plane following three hundred feet behind the Liberator, with Franklin Roosevelt Jr., the president’s son, aboard, was seriously hobbled by the midair explosion and forced into an emergency landing. The Kennedy-Willy aerial blast was so intense that more than fifty buildings in the town of New Delight Wood were damaged. A fragment of a radio was the only piece of the U.S. plane ever recovered.
What had gone so horrifically wrong? One possibility is that when Kennedy and Willy moved through the narrow passage between the cockpit and the bomb bay for their parachute jump, one of them inadvertently kicked a detonation wire. But that was just speculation. More likely, a circuit malfunctioned or a fire erupted in the aircraft. A review board later concluded that there had been no pilot error.
Beyond the simple tragedy of Joe Kennedy Jr.’s death is the fact that unknown to the Allies, the German V-1 launch sites near Calais were already obsolete when Operation Aphrodite began. Following earlier bombing raids and anticipating an Allied invasion by sea, Hitler had begun incrementally pulling out of Mimoyecques in the spring of 1944. The abandonment of the gargantuan project was one sign among many that the tide of the war had shifted, and particularly after the D-day landings, both sides were busy analyzing the Nazis’ remaining strategies. Most of the possibilities revolved around the German weapons that had yet to be unveiled, specifically von Braun’s super-secret V-2 and intercontinental missile, which Hitler hoped would leave New York City in flames. On September 5, the Canadian Third Infantry Division captured the Mimoyecques complex and finally learned its purpose, reporting to Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower that it contained enormous V-3 guns in various states of completion, but none of the infrastructure to suggest that it was intended as a base for von Braun’s savage V-1s and V-2s.
TWO PRIESTS ARRIVED at the Kennedy home at Hyannis Port to inform the family of Joe Jr.’s death. Their reaction was private. Over the following days, they proudly received Joe Jr.’s Navy Cross and Air Medal. And when a new destroyer was named the USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. in 1945, the family attended the christening. But even Joe Kennedy Sr., with all his clout, was kept in the dark about the mission that had killed his son. Only in 1963, when Jack was president, was he able to learn the exact details of his brother’s death and properly reach out to the copilot’s family in shared grief.
Jack did not let the melancholy he felt over his brother’s death that August become emotionally debilitating. On Labor Day weekend of 1944, Lenny Thom, his PT-109 executive officer, visited the Kennedys at Hyannis Port along with his wife, Kate. Ted, the youngest of the Kennedy boys, recalled in his memoir, True Compass, that the clapboard house became “an oasis of love.” Kate Thom was keenly aware that Joe Jr. had been killed only three weeks before. She noticed, though, that Jack didn’t speak about his brother’s death over the fun-filled weekend. As far as Kate could ascertain, the household was functioning normally. Jack, feeling far better physically than he had months earlier, led the way in swimming, tennis, and a boat race. One evening, he and his friends were sitting on the front porch with some of his sisters. Amid the banter, a friend of Jack’s started singing “Hooray for Hollywood.” Another friend, named Barney, goof-danced to the peppy song. Everyone watched with amusement. Kate idly thought that the two boys were a couple of hams. “While he’s singing,” she said later, “Barney’s dancing and upstairs, somebody yelled out, ‘Jack! Have some respect for your dead brother.’ (It was his father.)
“And we just froze,” she continued. “And within minutes we were all gone. But that was the only thing that happened. It was a happy time, you know.”
Rocket engineer Wernher von Braun spent the Second World War in the service of Hitler’s Third Reich, building V-2s to be used against France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Here he is at the Army Rocket Center at Peenemünde, in 1944, meeting officers of the Wehrmacht, during a demonstration launch of the V-2 rocket. At the time he was technical director at the Army Rocket Center.
DPA/Getty Images
4
Who’s Afraid of the V-2?
Starting from unlikely, even utopian origins in the Weimar spaceflight movement, and ending even more strangely with ineffective weapons and emaciated slaves, the German Army rocket program and its Peenemünde center without a doubt changed the face of the twentieth century.
—MICHAEL J. NEUFELD, THE ROCKET AND THE REICH (1995)
Even as England was suffering Germany’s V-1 barrage, rumors swirled about the next super-weapon in Hitler’s arsenal. “Britons pondered the possibility of worse to come,” the New York Times reported that summer of 1944, “perhaps huge explosive rockets. The horrifying prospect that Germany’s threatened new secret weapon might be a ten-ton explosive rocket—a robot bomb ten times the size of the V-1, or ‘buzz bomb,’ now being used against England—’may not be sheer propaganda’ a commentator at an Allied advance command post said.” British intelligence, having secured photos of a test V-2, understood its engineering structural and destructive capacity and surmised that the rocket was to be used against London. Another key (and essentially correct) assumption on which the Allies based their strategy was that the V-2 had a range of 210 miles.
Allied troops pushed to find and destroy every potential V-2 launch site within a 210-mile radius of London, a task that took them across the northern coast of France and into Belgium and Holland. In his usual forthright fashion, British prime minister Winston Churchill pronounced a German V-2 rocket attack and another Luftwaffe blitz like the one of 1940–41 the direst threats to his nation’s survival.
As the Allies raced to suppress the German V-2 campaign even before it began, the war-ravaged British capital was on constant high alert. Rushed by the devastating German loss on D-day, von Braun conducted a missile test on June 22, during which his V-2 crossed the Kármán line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, reaching an altitude of 109 miles—and became the first man-made object to reach outer space.
Despite von Braun’s stunning success, the German High Command was becoming impatient with progress on the V-2, specifically its intricate engineering and the unending need for technical refinements. Too many V-2s were breaking up on entry. On August 6, 1944, Heinrich Himmler, consumed with frenzied urgency, installed SS general Hans Kammler as director of the V-2 project, with marching orders to prepare for utilization of the rocket
“as quickly as possible.” Dictatorial, brusque, and a fanatical adherent of Nazi ideology, the hard-nosed Kammler clashed with many at Peenemünde. Ironically, his insistence that he be granted military command of what he declared would be Germany’s most glorious campaign delayed the V-2 offensive even more. Von Braun loathed Kammler, but continued his trial-and-error experiments on the V-2. Even though von Braun thought Kammler dangerous, he nevertheless advised his superior officer on how to speed up mass production. Fearful of the Armaments Ministry, von Braun had learned how to obey orders without challenging assumptions. As the German Army became desperate for men of fighting age, von Braun found a noncombat management position for his younger brother, Magnus, at the Mittelwerk compound, where meaningful jobs came with one of the Third Reich’s highest-priority security clearances.
On August 29, Hitler ordered V-2 attacks to begin as soon as possible. The Allies continued to methodically target suspected V-2 launch sites within a 210-mile launch radius of London, but what they didn’t know was that Dornberger had specified early on that the V-2 launch apparatus be mobile, able to be quickly put in position, utilized, and then moved elsewhere for another round of launches, frustrating Allied efforts to track the weapons.
On September 8, 1944, the Nazis fired a V-2 rocket at Paris, which had been liberated by the Allies just two weeks before. This rocket landed near the Porte d’Italie in the French capital, causing no casualties. Within four minutes of takeoff, a second V-2 came screaming back to Earth. This ballistic missile killed six people and changed the world forever. The moment the officer in charge shouted, “Zundung!” (ignition) represented the culmination of more than twenty-five years of German engineering brilliance, technological innovation, military desperation, and rank brutality. At just under forty-six feet in length, the V-2 weighed over fourteen tons, including about one ton of explosives. Following designs innovated by Oberth and von Braun, it lifted off when liquid fuel and oxidizer were pumped into the combustion chamber at the rate of thirty-three gallons per second. After about one minute aloft, with the fuel depleted, the rocket traveled through space at an altitude of just under fifty miles, at which point it arced ballistically toward its target, reaching speeds of up to thirty-six hundred miles per hour. Midcourse corrections had been made at Peenemünde with three components: sophisticated gyroscopes that measured the movements of the rocket; an onboard analog computer that calculated necessary changes; and rudders that could be adjusted by the computer.
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