He is really home—the boy for whom you prayed so hard . . . what a sense of gratitude to God to have spared him.
—ROSE KENNEDY, DIARY ENTRY, JANUARY 1944
Jack Kennedy knew all the rules in sailing, but the rules didn’t know him. The fiercer the Atlantic wind, the choppier the whitecaps, the more exhilarated Kennedy became. He longed to test his mettle against the raw elements, to feel part of the barrel and roar of the sea, to infuse his days with wind-whipped adventure. Some called his extreme sailing reckless, others a death wish, but the fact was that Kennedy simply possessed a “blue mind,” experiencing his greatest contentment at or beside the sea. Whether speed-racing in the Edgartown regattas, beachcombing around Hyannis Port, collecting shells on Monomoy Island, challenging the inward-pressing tide on Nantucket Sound, or suntanning in Palm Beach, Kennedy was his most authentic self, his freest in the old transcendentalist sense, near the ocean.
That love of a maritime environment guaranteed that Jack Kennedy would join the U.S. Navy as war engulfed the world. On September 25, 1941, at age twenty-four, he was sworn in as an ensign. Because of his grim history of physical ailments, his commission had been anything but automatic, requiring that his father help arrange the appointment via a former colleague. That Joseph Kennedy Sr. could facilitate such things wasn’t news to his two oldest sons, but increasingly that overbearing influence had to be contained. Jack’s older brother, Joe Jr., was very cognizant of not getting smothered by his father. Taking a break from Harvard Law School and politics—he had been a 1940 Democratic Convention delegate—Joe Jr. had joined the Naval Reserve and, during the second half of 1941, was training to become an aviator. Although he had dabbled in anti-interventionist thinking, he was now fully committed to helping Great Britain defeat Germany.
Joe Jr. earned his naval wings in March 1942 and was already thinking of his postwar political career. Strikingly handsome with a touch of arrogance in his smile, he had a lofty conception of obligation and devotion to America, and believed that with ardor, focus, and drive, there was nothing he couldn’t achieve. Though he never explicitly expressed the desire to be a senator or governor, a sense of destiny swirled around him. Occasionally he hinted that being president was a noble pursuit. To his credit, he intuited the danger of being tarred by his father’s reputation for isolationism and appeasement, which had fallen out of favor in the Democratic Party. Indeed, some scholars believe he joined the navy with “a private mission” to prove that the Kennedys “were not cowards or defeatists.” The Kennedy brothers were fitting themselves into navy service, determined to test their patriotic grit along with millions of other Americans. But more than most families, the Kennedy children coveted their status within the confines of their own clan.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—“a date which will live in infamy,” as President Roosevelt termed it—Jack and Joe Kennedy were already in uniform and ready for combat duty. They would never have to scrub off the taint of using their father’s influence to avoid military service. Four days after Pearl Harbor, Nazi Germany and its Axis partners declared war on the United States. “Industrial mobilization” became an urgent catchphrase across the nation. Military bases were built on empty land. Factories were adapted to switch from manufacturing consumer goods to producing war matériel. Between 1940 and 1943, enlistment in the U.S. Armed Forces expanded from fewer than five hundred thousand to more than nine million. Mobilization efforts swelled in every direction, from far-flung Honolulu to the shipyards of Norfolk.
Jack Kennedy, it seemed, was headed for a wartime career at the Office of Naval Intelligence, in Washington. With his precarious health, vaguely journalistic ambitions, and rarefied background as a best-selling author, a stateside desk job that involved researching and writing reports seemed the ideal post. However, Kennedy had no intention of staying put in Washington, and he almost immediately began jockeying for a naval combat role in the Pacific. Trying to prove his valor, he hopscotched around the country from one military base to another, from Rhode Island to South Carolina to Illinois, and he stayed on course, despite back surgery that required a two-month respite in the hospital.
While Jack Kennedy was exchanging his rich, footloose lifestyle for the disciplinary navy, Wernher von Braun had made what amounted to a Faustian bargain for the advance of rocketry. He joined the Nazi Party and became an SS officer. He later argued that he’d had no choice, claiming he was watched carefully by the Gestapo for any sign of disloyalty. It must be observed, however, that some of von Braun’s contemporaries found ways to resist the fascist regime, often perpetrating small, undramatic acts of slowdown, sabotage, or resistance. But not the coddled team at Peenemünde. Many of these engineers were Hitler loyalists who looked forward to the day when Aryan Germans would have the promised Lebensraum (room to live) granted by conquest of Europe. Desperate in later years for an excuse to vindicate himself from his close association with Hitler, von Braun would contend that he was merely an earnest engineer who put his craft above all else. This excuse didn’t prevent him from enjoying his wartime position or being fêted by the Third Reich’s rich and powerful.
What wasn’t disputed was the intense demands von Braun faced at Peenemünde. The pace was grueling, and he worked long hours. Fellow SS officers found him fast-minded, articulate, brusque—only his proclivity for inserting literary and historical allusions in everyday conversation made him unusual. Hitler had set a goal of making five thousand V-2 ballistic missiles annually; frustrated, von Braun knew that was an improbability. The unfortunate reality was that a practical version of the V-2 had yet to fly, despite the many test launches he and an ever-larger corps of engineers fast-tracked.
As a perfectionist, von Braun, in later years, was fond of saying that “crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.” But time was of the essence for the Third Reich. The first official V-2 test rocket lifted off from Peenemünde in July 1942, reaching an altitude of one mile before blowing up over the Baltic. With the Eastern Front in a stalemate following Germany’s monumental failure to defeat Russia, armed rockets were needed for a renewed campaign against Britain. Another V-2 was tested in August 1942 and reached an altitude of seven miles before disintegration.
Then von Braun and Dornberger, the military commander of the rocket team, had a success. On October 3, 1942, a V-2 launched from Peenemünde broke the sound barrier and traveled to an altitude of 52.5 miles at a range of 120 miles, nosing into the ionosphere, that wide band of extremely thin air that separates earthly atmospheric bands from outer space. The test marked the first time a man-made projectile had technically ever flown beyond the bulk of Earth’s atmosphere. Their first inclination was to think about how much the new weapon would help the Third Reich military. Deep down, they also knew that the test had longer-term implications for future space travel. This “was a true ancestor of practically every rocket flown in the world today,” says historian Paul Dickson. “It was a true spaceship in that it carried both its own fuel and oxygen and could, if needed, work in a vacuum.”
Grasping the significance of the moment, von Braun and Dornberger kept their eyes glued to binoculars that game-changing afternoon until their forty-six-foot-long liquid-propellant missile disappeared. Some historians have erroneously claimed that October 3, 1942, ushered in the epochal Space Age. Such statements about the V-2 are questionable because it never reached the one-hundred-kilometer altitude until after the war. But the V-2 did mean that all that would be needed for futuristic moonbound rockets was increased thrust for larger payloads. “It was an unforgettable sight,” Dornberger recalled. “In the full glare of the sunlight the rocket rose higher and higher. The flame darting from the stern was almost as long as the rocket itself. The air was filled with a sound like rolling thunder.” While von Braun might have preferred to build space exploration vehicles, during the war years they found themselves working on ballistic missiles, rocket engines for aircraft, and other lethal machines.
In early 1943, setbacks in the Mediterranean theater convinced Hitler, previously a skeptic, that the V-2 was now essential to victory, putting Peenemünde at the nerve center of Nazi war plans. When von Braun and Dornberger showed Hitler film footage of their V-2 success that July and promised him that the rocket could deliver 2,200-pound warheads across the English Channel into London and other cities, Hitler grew visibly intrigued. Inflated with revenge, he hoped to use the terror weapon on civilian targets in England as payback for the Allied bombings of German cities. “Europe and the world will be too small from now on to contain a war,” Hitler said. “With such weapons humanity will be unable to endure it.”
AS VON BRAUN and Dornberger inaugurated the V-2 Age, Jack Kennedy was completing the Naval Reserve Officers Training School at Northwestern University in Chicago. The previous June, at Midway, the United States had halted the Japanese naval advance in the Pacific. Two months later, at Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, U.S. troops halted Japan’s island-hopping advance toward Australia. During those tense times, Kennedy attained the rank of lieutenant, junior grade, on October 10, 1942. He immediately volunteered for the patrol torpedo (PT) boat service, a fairly new command whose development had been accelerated following the attack on Pearl Harbor. PT boats were long and fast, with a relatively low profile and a top speed of forty knots (about forty-six miles per hour). Modestly armed, they were intended mainly to interrupt enemy supply lines by sinking barges, freighters, and sometimes the warships that accompanied them. The most intimidating of the enemy ships that might be encountered on the supply routes in the Pacific Theater was a Japanese destroyer, which averaged a speed of thirty-four knots and lacked the PT’s maneuverability. Attacking in groups and buzzing around their Japanese targets, PTs were known to American sailors as “mosquito boats.”
Looking something like an enlarged, fortified racing speedboat, each PT boat carried two officers and a crew of eleven. Not wanting to waste experienced career officers and other key personnel on such small-scale commands, the navy sought graduates of first-rate colleges, preferably men who had played team sports. An even higher priority was given to graduates who sailed or motored their own boats in private life. Because recruiters favored college-educated yachtsmen most of all, leadership of a PT boat became something of a snob assignment. But there were two catches: PT skippering was extremely dangerous, and the navy wanted men who weren’t married. Jack Kennedy was suited in all respects except one: he hadn’t been a leader in any organization, with the possible exception of his gang at Choate—and they’d all come close to expulsion for his offbeat pranks. And while he was a fine sailor on Nantucket Sound and Buzzards Bay, and had won sailing races, there was a huge difference between taking day outings in Atlantic waters and commanding a boat under the stress of war.
Despite their yachting-set cachet, PT boats weren’t frivolous or experimental; they were choice weapons in the Pacific Theater. And unlike rockets, they could be mass-produced easily by companies such as Elco Motor Yachts, in Bayonne, New Jersey, and Higgins Industries, in New Orleans, Louisiana. William Liebenow of Virginia, who joined the PT boat service a few months before Kennedy, perfectly summarized the navy’s need: “Our big-ship navy had just about been destroyed at Pearl Harbor,” he explained. “So PT boats were kind of something that they could manufacture quickly and get them out to the war zones to harass the Jap fleet as much as possible.”
In March 1943, Kennedy was given command of PT-109 as a lieutenant. He was ordered to the Solomon Islands and took command on April 23. At the helm, he initially participated in preparations for troop movements or invasion. That summer, nighttime patrols for enemy supply barges were also ongoing. All the enlisted men admired Kennedy from the get-go. Not only was the lieutenant a gallant leader, but he was also one of the boys and experienced the same homesickness as the rest. One afternoon, he tore the PT-109 patch off his uniform and mailed it in a letter to a cousin struggling in boarding school. “I’m not so crazy about where I’m at either, kiddo,” he wrote. “Be brave, wear the patch, and we’ll get through this.”
Naval lieutenant John F. Kennedy on board the torpedo boat PT-109 he commanded in the southwest Pacific.
MPI/Archive Photos/Getty Images
Early on August 2, 1943, PT-109 was moving as quietly as possible in Blackett, North Solomon, a strait used for a so-called Japanese Express of supply ships and escorts fortifying troops on nearby islands. At about 2:00 a.m., the 109 was mostly powered down. With Lieutenant Kennedy and the crew stealthily looking for a floating target in the channel, their boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Ten seconds later, Kennedy’s vessel had broken apart and was sinking fast. Two crew members had died. The PT-109 went up in flames. Stranded in the middle of the Pacific, an injured Kennedy later said he didn’t know exactly what had caused the disaster, whether human error or the bad luck of their boat being effectively unmaneuverable under low power. All he knew was that death was knocking. “People that haven’t been there certainly can’t, they just can’t understand how Jack Kennedy got hit by a destroyer,” observed Liebenow, “but I can see where it could happen.”
Clinging to debris, Kennedy remained coolheaded in the shipwreck’s aftermath. He saved the badly injured Patrick McMahon by pulling him in a three-hour swim to a small island a few miles away. Over the course of the next twelve hours, all the survivors miraculously made it there. Desperate to stay alive, Kennedy ordered his crew to swim to another island, where food and water were available. Thinking fast, Kennedy carved an SOS message in a coconut and handed it to two natives willing to row in a primitive boat seeking help for the marooned Americans.
On August 8, six days after PT-109 was rammed, the badly sunburned surviving crew and their commander were rescued. Kennedy was welcomed back to the PT base as a full-fledged naval hero, earning the Navy and Marine Corps medals for leadership. Although he found it hard to explain how his boat had drifted into the middle of the sea alone, he certainly wasn’t blamed for the disaster; instead, he was almost immediately assigned to a different PT boat. “Most of the courage shown in the war came from men’s understanding of their interdependence on each other,” Kennedy would later reflect. “Men were saving other men’s lives at the risk of their own simply because they realized that perhaps the next day their lives would be saved in turn. And so there was built up a great feeling of comradeship and fellowship, and loyalty.”
BY THE BEGINNING of the summer of 1943, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the German SS, with assistance from Walter Dornberger and Arthur Rudolph, brought hundreds of slave laborers to Peenemünde to work on rocket assembly lines as part of an effort to fast-track V-2 production. They were following orders given by Albert Speer’s Armament Ministry. The Baltic facility was now operating at a frenetic pace.
On the night of August 17–18, 1943, a fleet of 596 British bombers, one of the largest air raid forces ever assembled by the RAF, filled the skies over northeast coastal Germany on a mission to find Peenemünde, which it did despite clever camouflage that included artificial fog. For two hours, British bombs rained down on the Baltic Sea facility, killing 735 people, including more than 500 “foreign workers,” some of whom were POWs. At first light, Dornberger’s test facilities seemed devastated, but it soon became clear that the rocket development facility was still operable. “After four weeks of cleanup work,” Dornberger later bragged, “Peenemünde worked full-time again. . . . In the case of the [overall] V-2 offensive, the bombing neither delayed it nor reduced it to any extent.”
Heeresversuchsanstalt (Army Research Center), Peenemünde, 1942–1945, draft for a V-2 rocket launching position. The drawing was done on June 3, 1942.
INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo
The British RAF attack on Peenemünde forced the German Army and the Armaments Ministry to establish new manufacturing sites at hard-to-find locations. Seeking a more secure spot for production of their ballistic missiles, the Nazis developed a secret underground facility carved inside Kohnstein Mountain, near Nordhausen, in the Harz Mountains. Using concentration camp slave labor, they transformed a tunnel complex into a facility that could produce thousands of V-2s. The location in the Harz Mountains was already a top-secret storage facility for the Nazis. Now it would be known as Mittelwerk (or “Central Works”), and it would employ slave labor from Dora, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp erected inside the tunnels themselves. The German aim was to avoid RAF and U.S. Army Air Corps bombing strikes, which had been destroying cities and industrial plants.
The burden of preparing the Mittelwerk factory under the topographical restraints of a mountain area should have taken years, but von Braun, Dornberger, and their powerful Nazi Party colleagues in charge of the top-priority program didn’t have years. They barely had months. With Hitler’s strongest armies having been decimated by the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front and Allied troops seizing control of southern Italy, the V-2 could buy time to secure the Third Reich’s survival, but only if it arrived quickly.
Conditions at Mittelwerk and Dora as 1944 began were nothing short of a living hell: there was no fresh air, little water or food, vermin and lice, plumbing that consisted of open barrels, and grueling work without end—slave laborers were tortured and beaten if caught working at less than a double-time clip. These physical strains were combined with the oppressive knowledge that illness or injury might mean instant execution by their Nazi overseers. The daily piles of corpses awaiting cremation—upon their arrival, the inmates were greeted with a somber Nazi induction speech of the “endurance or death” variety. Only some Italians were granted POW status.
More than twenty thousand slave laborers perished from disease, exhaustion, malnutrition, torture, and beatings at Dora while building V-1 and V-2 rockets throughout 1944. Words can never aptly describe how difficult life at Dora-Mittelbau was for its workers. Von Braun, a colonel in the SS, was deeply complicit in these war crimes. He was a regular visitor to Mittelwerk.
In later years, a disingenuous von Braun would profess to have been just an apolitical space lover from the ex-Weimar amateur rocket group tasked by the Nazis to engage in military missile development. He repeatedly pointed out that Himmler had the Gestapo arrest him in March 1944, supposedly for sabotaging war rocket projects. Incarcerated by the SS for the crime of articulating “frivolous dreams” of rockets orbiting Earth and the moon and expressing doubts about the war, he was tossed into a Stettin prison cell, and feared for his life. However, Dornberger and Reich Minister of Armaments Albert Speer vouched for him, and he was released under strict orders never to utter a word or even think about space exploration. After the war, trying to escape culpability for the Mittelwerk crimes, von Braun flaunted this prison story as inoculation against charges of Nazi collaboration.
A BACK INJURY John Kennedy suffered in the sinking of PT-109 led to his medical discharge. Soon after his return to the United States in January 1944 (as Allied troops landed near Anzio to begin the six-month campaign to capture Rome), he was sitting in a Manhattan nightclub with John Hersey, who the previous year had published a Life magazine story about a PT boat squadron in the Solomon Islands. Upon hearing Kennedy’s saga, Hersey suggested another article in Life, about the demise of the boat and the fate of its crew. After checking with his father, Kennedy agreed to cooperate. By the time he and Hersey rendezvoused for in-depth interviews about the Solomon campaign, they had to meet in a hospital room in Boston, where Kennedy had undergone surgery for his back injury. He spent most of late winter and spring in various hospitals and resorts, recuperating and being treated for malaria, a common ailment among service members returning from the Pacific Theater.
In May 1944, Jack reported to the Submarine Chaser Training Center in Miami. His father had purchased the six-bedroom La Querida (roughly translated as “my dear one”), in Palm Beach, for $120,000 in 1933. The Mediterranean Revival home, set on two acres, was expanded to eleven bedrooms; multiple second-floor balconies offered sweeping views of the Atlantic. The sprawling estate, designed by architect Addison Mizner, showcased two hundred feet of pristine Atlantic beachfront. Jack retreated there to enjoy the swimming pool, soak up the Caribbean trade winds, and assess his future while still serving in American wartime.
Part of Jack’s job in Miami entailed piloting PT boats around South Florida waters in anti-German-attack defensive exercises. Getting to watch Floridians and tourists frolic on beaches was far better than bloody combat. “They all wait anxiously for D-day,” he wrote a friend, “and you can find beaches crowded every day with people—all looking seaward and towards the invasion coast.”
Jack always loved being in Florida. Early in the war, his brother Joe Jr. had been stationed at Jacksonville, learning to fly PBY Catalina twin-engine patrol planes (“flying boats”) off St. John’s River. In May 1942 Joe Jr. received operational training at Banana River, Florida. His naval air station was next door to Cape Canaveral, from which NASA’s rockets would be launched during the 1960s, when Jack served as president.
In May 1944, Jack decided to learn how to fly, following in the footsteps of his brother Joe Jr., who had earned his naval aviator wings two years before. He enrolled at the Embry-Riddle Seaplane Base, in Miami, and spent ten days piloting Piper J-3 Cub floatplanes around southern Florida, joining his new interest in aviation with his long-standing connection to sea and shore. (Kennedy’s flight log confirming these first attempts at piloting aircraft was not discovered until 2018, during research for this book. It now resides in the historical collection of the Shapell Manuscript Foundation.)
After two years of planning, on June 6, 1944, the Allies launched Operation Overlord, sending 156,000 American, British, and Canadian troops (most under twenty years old) across the English Channel to the beaches of Normandy. It was the largest amphibious military assault in history, intended to liberate Western Europe while forcing the Nazis to divide their efforts between their Russia campaign and this new front. On D-day, Allied troops landed on five beaches along a fifty-mile stretch of the heavily fortified Normandy coast. Overwhelming or evading the Nazis’ supposedly impenetrable defenses, the Allies gained a crucial foothold in Europe and decisively changed the direction of the war. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower later speculated that if German V-2 missile technology had been on a more “accelerated schedule,” it might have caused him to scrub Operation Overlord, thereby dramatically changing the endgame of the war. For Jack Kennedy, that historic June 6 set in motion unanticipated events that would connect the very highest and lowest points of his life.
Just two days after the D-day landings began, Kennedy took his last flying lesson. For forty-five minutes he piloted over the Port of Miami, realizing that the war in Europe would soon be over and that his brother Joe Jr. would be coming home. For the first time in months, he worried that he was frittering away his time in sunny Florida. On June 11, one week after D-day, Kennedy was honored for his bravery in the South Pacific. Meanwhile, in Europe, Allied troops were spending the summer liberating Rome and pushing slowly inland from the coast of France. On the Eastern Front, the Soviets were launching a massive offensive in eastern Belarus, destroying the German Army Group Center and driving westward. By late July, the Anglo-American forces would break out of the Normandy beaches and begin racing southeastward toward Paris. By August, the Russians were pushing toward Warsaw, in central Poland.
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 would 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.”