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