Lost destiny : Joe Kennedy Jr. and the doomed WWII mission to save London

286 Pages·2015·3.77 MB·English

by  Axelrod

LOST DESTINY
JOE KENNEDY JR. AND THE DOOMED WWII
MISSION TO SAVE LONDON
ALAN AXELROD
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For Anita and Ian
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
PROLOGUE
TWO VIEWS FROM LONDON
CHAPTER 1
CHOSEN SON
CHAPTER 2
MOST DANGEROUS
CHAPTER 3
THE BITTER FRUIT OF PEENEMÜNDE
CHAPTER 4
NEVER SO LUCKY AGAIN
CHAPTER 5
WAR-WEARY
CHAPTER 6
FOGGED IN
CHAPTER 7
THE DRONES OF AUGUST
CHAPTER 8
A BASKETFUL OF RATTLESNAKES
CHAPTER 9
“I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO TELL HIM THE TRUTH”
Notes
Index
Photographs
About the Author
Copyright
PROLOGUE
TWO VIEWS FROM LONDON
A BIRDCAGE, STILL HANGING IN A WINDOW WITH A LITTLE DEAD
CANARY IN IT
Everyone knew—the world knew, the Germans certainly knew—that four in the
afternoon was teatime in London and throughout England. At almost precisely that
hour, on September 7, 1940, 348 Luftwaffe bombers escorted by 617 fighters began
raining bombs on London. They left at six—the end of teatime—having reduced a
portion of the British capital to rubble and flame.
The fires were of great tactical significance for the raid: Two hours later, at about
eight, a second wave of bombers swept in, guided by flame through the deepening
autumn dark. This part of the raid lasted until 4:30 on the morning of September 8. As
daylight returned, Doris Louisa Scott emerged from a shelter in an East London park.
She made her way to her house—“those all around were bomb blasted, and I saw this
woman cleaning the front doorstep of her demolished house as if it were business as
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usual.”
This was day one of what Londoners would call the Blitz, short for Blitzkrieg, a
German compound word meaning “lightning war.” For the next fifty-seven days, daily
or nightly or both, London was bombed. During the rest of 1940 and through the spring
of 1941, London and other cities—most horrifically Coventry, on November 14, 1940
—would be pounded sporadically. In some families, parents responded by sending their
children away, either into the English countryside or abroad, across the Atlantic, far
from England. This wasn’t necessarily safe. That September, a Welsh lad named Colin
Ryder-Richardson was put aboard the British-flagged City Line Ltd. steamer City of
Benares, bound for New York. Four days after leaving Liverpool, the ship was
torpedoed in the middle of the night.
There was a loud bang, a very loud bang, and almost immediately a smell of, presumably cordite—it was an
unmistakable smell. . . . I was in my pyjamas—and I hadn’t got my lifejacket, but I immediately put it on as I
got out of bed. I put on my slippers. . . . There was a Force 10 gale. The ship’s nurse held my hand and got me
on to a lifeboat. It was freezing cold and the boat was waterlogged. I clung to the nurse, then as the night went
on, lots of people were dying. This man on the boat gently suggested to me that I should release the ship’s
nurse, as in his view she was dead . . . [but] I didn’t really want to let go of her because I felt that I would then
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lose whatever resource that I had in my arms.
Day after day, night after night, the bombs fell. December 29, 1940, “was a night,”
American war correspondent Ernie Pyle reported,
when London was ringed and stabbed with fire. . . . Flames seemed to whip hundreds of feet into the air.
Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud, and out of this cloud there gradually took shape—so
faintly at first that we weren’t sure we saw correctly—the gigantic dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. St. Paul’s was
surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportions—growing slowly clearer and
clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before
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peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield.
Journalist Pyle found a “monstrous loveliness” in his view of London, “stabbed with
great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the
pin points of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over with a ceiling of pink that held
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bursting shells, balloons, flares and the grind of vicious engines.”
The Londoners Pyle encountered were stoic and heroic. Bad as the “St. Paul’s Blitz”
was, even worse was to come. May 10, 1941, Ellen Harris, a Reuters reporter in the
Houses of Parliament, recalled, “was the night that London was set afire.” German
bombers dropped a combination of high-explosive and incendiary bombs, which
created massive firestorms throughout entire stretches of the city. Harris emerged from
a shelter the next morning and picked her way over the smoldering rubble to get home
and change her clothes. Along the way, a middle-aged man stopped her.
“What are we going to do?” he asked her. “We can’t go on like this. We’ve got to
seek peace.” He was practically in tears.
“Do you realize,” Harris asked him, “that you’re playing right into Hitler’s hands?
This is just what he’s setting out to do. If he can do this to you, to get you into this state,
and you start on me, and I join in—and go up the road and tell somebody and you do
the same to somebody else—now, you’d get people in the state of mind and their
morale goes. What you’ve got to do is remember what I’m telling myself—this is my
war effort. And this is your war effort. Buck up. . . . We’ve got to keep going.”
“Thank you,” he told her. “Thank you very much.”
And, with that, Harris continued toward her home, wondering all the while if her
home still existed. She passed “people moving children’s prams which they’d filled
with little things they’d rescued from their homes. There were no tears—nothing
whatsoever—just firmness—‘We’ll rescue what we can.’ They were all right—but what
got me into tears was a birdcage, still hanging in a window with a little dead canary in
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it.”
DEMOCRACY IS FINISHED IN ENGLAND . . .
All four grandparents of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. came to Massachusetts dirt poor, in
flight from the famine that devastated Ireland in the 1840s. His father, Patrick Joseph
“P. J.” Kennedy, set up in Boston as a saloonkeeper, investor, and local politician,
earning a level of prosperity that propelled his elder son through Boston Latin School
and Harvard College. In 1914, P. J. married Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daughter of
Boston mayor John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. Uniting two rival Irish American
political families, the marriage positioned Joe Sr. for a powerful life in politics, but he
chose instead to continue the business career he had begun after graduating from
Harvard. His first job, in 1912, was as a state bank examiner, and he used it as a kind of
postgraduate course in banking. In 1913, he borrowed from family and friends the
equivalent of a million dollars in today’s money to purchase the controlling shares of
Columbia Trust Bank, thereby becoming, at age twenty-five, the country’s youngest
bank president.
He went on to profit in real estate and, when the United States entered World War I in
1917, he secured himself from conscription by becoming assistant general manager of
Bethlehem Steel’s Quincy, Massachusetts, shipyard—a civilian position deemed vital to
the war effort. Not only did the new job honorably keep him out of uniform and allow
him to continue pursuing his investments, it brought him face-to-face with a young
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at the time assistant secretary of the navy.
Leaving the shipyard in 1919, after war’s end, Joe Sr. became a stockbroker, riding
the Roaring Twenties bull to a multimillion-dollar fortune, then making even more
money when, acting on insider information (not illegal at the time), he anticipated the
crash of 1929 by shorting a large portfolio of stocks. During the 1920s, Kennedy
became a movie studio head and the owner of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain of more
than seven hundred vaudeville theaters, which had just begun to replace live shows with
movies. In 1928, he founded the Radio-Keith-Orpheum film studio, RKO, and had a