by Sam Kean
Cherwell tried to rally, but to no avail. Churchill was convinced, and from that day forward the German rocket program at Peenemünde became an official threat to the Allies. What they learned over the next six weeks only heightened the danger.
By the middle of the war, Paul Rosbaud—the publisher in Berlin who’d taken the nom de guerre of the Griffin—had perfected a sort of petty sabotage against the Nazis. He plastered letters with excessive stamps to waste paper, and exacerbated wartime shortages of copper by hoarding small change and removing copper fixtures from the bathrooms of trains and flinging them out the window. But aside from such pranks, the Griffin did his most valuable work gathering intelligence. Although the British had ignored his 1941 report about V-weapons, he had never stopped pursuing leads about Peenemünde, and his persistence paid off in August 1943.
The Griffin’s usual method for extracting secrets was to get people drunk over dinner, and this time his mark was the nuclear physicist Pascual Jordan. Jordan had once been considered the equal of Werner Heisenberg and probably would have won a Nobel Prize had he not been such a committed Nazi. The great tragedy of his life was that he stuttered, and not mildly. He stuttered constantly, in every conversation, sometimes butchering words so badly that people averted their eyes in mortification—which only made him stutter more. Rosbaud sensed, in fact, a connection between Jordan’s stuttering and his politics. The Nazis glorified good looks and physical perfection, and Rosbaud theorized that scores of “hunchbacks, people with limping legs, and stammerers became members of the Party” to compensate for feelings of inadequacy.
When the war started, Jordan began working at Peenemünde, ostensibly as a meteorologist and later as a rocket engineer. This story didn’t sit right with Rosbaud. Jordan was a nuclear scientist, and a good one. Could he be testing atomic payloads at Peenemünde? The Griffin decided to investigate, so he and some friends in the resistance invited Jordan to dinner one night in August 1943 and began plying him with drinks. This loosened Jordan’s tongue in both senses of the word: for whatever reason, he stuttered less when drunk and therefore tended to talk more at such times. The booze lowered his inhibitions as well, and with one of Rosbaud’s buxom lady friends making eyes at him, he was soon regaling the table with tales about research at Peenemünde. He even let slip the schedule for launching the first rockets. It was an uproarious evening, and Jordan had a grand time. He never noticed the Griffin’s friend in the corner taking notes.
Jordan stumbled home and no doubt had a hell of a katzenjammer the next day; who knows how much he even remembered of the night. The Griffin’s friend, meanwhile, dashed off an immediate report to London.
Given all the warning signs, the British decided to bomb Peenemünde as soon as possible, a mission they called Operation Hydra.
Inevitably, though, the warring factions within Churchill’s government got into another row over Hydra, this time about what exactly to bomb. One faction wanted to restrict the attack to the power plant and rocket factories. Ultimately, this side lost. To kill the hydra of myth, Hercules had to cut off and burn every last head, and the British decided on a similarly thorough approach with Peenemünde. This meant targeting not just infrastructure but people—it meant deliberately killing scientists and engineers by bombing the nearby barracks.
The attack began on August 17 when a Royal Air Force squadron roared past the northern coast of Germany on a heading for Berlin. German radar picked up the invaders, and the Luftwaffe dispatched every Nazi fighter in the vicinity, 158 total, to protect the heart of the Reich. The feint worked brilliantly. While the Germans were distracted with Berlin, a second wave of nearly six hundred bombers took off from England and swept into Peenemünde at 11:25 p.m. They dropped three million pounds of explosives and obliterated most everything in sight, scoring several direct hits on the barracks. They also spied a housing development for scientists in a nearby forest and flattened a hundred more homes there.
The most vivid account of the raid comes from the diary of a German secretary. She recalled running through a boulevard of flames on the Peenemünde campus as buildings collapsed all around her. At one point she almost splashed into a pool of blood, and gasped to see a severed leg floating in it. Another eyewitness spotted the military commander of the grounds—the same man who’d boasted to von Thoma that “the fun will start soon”—sobbing in despair as his life’s work burned around him: “Peenemünde,” he wailed, “my beautiful Peenemünde!”
Most engineers and scientists fled the scene, intent on saving their skins, but the wunderkind Wernher von Braun refused to abandon his beautiful Peenemünde. He grabbed the aforementioned secretary by the hand and shouted, a bit melodramatically, “We must rescue the secret documents!” With a few other brave souls they plunged into von Braun’s burning office building and felt their way along a smoke-choked corridor to a staircase. Upon reaching the second story, they found the entire center of the floor collapsed, and had to edge around the gaping hole to a safe in the corner. Von Braun spun it open, and the secretary spent the next hour dashing up and down the stairs with armfuls of paper and tossing them into a second safe outside. She finally collapsed in exhaustion, while the oven of the fires continued to cook the air around her.
At first blush Operation Hydra seemed like a disaster for Peenemünde. The very next morning the chief of staff of the Luftwaffe (whose planes had circled uselessly over Berlin, leaving Peenemünde exposed) shot himself in the head in disgrace; his secretary found his body in his office. But von Braun had managed to rescue the most important documents, saving this hard-won knowledge. Even worse for the Allies, the raid managed to kill very few scientists. Thanks to nearby sirens, most of them had fled their homes before the bombers arrived, and of the 120 Germans who died, only two were considered top researchers. Sadly, the barracks that suffered the direct hits turned out to be quarters for slaves, who couldn’t run. Six hundred of them died that night, including several Luxembourgers who’d provided key intelligence for the Allies—intelligence that had allowed them to plan the raid in the first place. The British also lost forty planes and 215 troops to antiaircraft fire. Overall, Operation Hydra had left several important heads unburned.
Hydra also had another, subtler effect. Although a poor strategist, Hitler had a lively military imagination that sometimes served him well. Instead of clinging to World War I–era weapons and tactics (like the French Maginot Line), he championed tanks and fighter planes and the innovative Blitzkrieg. On the other hand, Hitler’s imagination sometimes led him to gamble on grandiose projects, and right after the gutting of Peenemünde, he decided to double down on his most fantastical scheme yet: the so-called high-pressure gun, or Hochdruckpumpe.
The Hochdruckpumpe consisted of a 416-foot-long gun barrel capable of launching 600 nine-foot rockets every hour. Hitler dubbed the pump the V-3, his third and greatest vengeance weapon, and he intended to aim it at the heart of London. In preparation, he ordered his military engineers to erect even more concrete bunkers in northern France. Specifically, the V-3 launch site would sit near Mimoyecques—the tiny village that Joe Kennedy and his sister had blithely driven by in their Chrysler convertible on his tour of the Continent a few years prior.
CHAPTER 31
PT-109
For the time being, Joe Kennedy remained unaware of developments in Mimoyecques. He had a more pressing threat to monitor anyway—his kid brother.
Bored with naval intelligence, Jack had begun a fling with a Danish newspaper columnist named Inga Arvad in early 1943. (He called her “Inga-Binga” in private.) Unfortunately, Arvad was a little too cozy with Hitler, having accompanied him to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. She’d also attended Göring’s wedding and chummed around with Goebbels. Given her charms, the FBI worried that she was wheedling information out of Jack—or had turned him into a spy—so agents wiretapped his telephone and began following the couple around. They didn’t turn up much, but the navy wanted to dump Jack anyhow—and would have, e
xcept for his father. So in February 1943 the navy transferred Jack to a mobile torpedo unit training in Rhode Island. It was considered a win-win. Jack got an exciting mission, and the navy eliminated a security risk by separating him from Arvad. For her part, Inga-Binga thought the transfer absurd. Jack already suffered from back problems (“He looks like a limping monkey from behind,” she told a friend), and sending him off to combat seemed reckless. Nevertheless, in April 1943 the navy deployed Jack to the Solomon Islands, east of Papua New Guinea, the site of some of the most ferocious combat of the war.
The boat Jack commanded, PT-109, was essentially a nautical wasp. PTs had light wooden hulls that made them sleek and fast and easy to maneuver. Under cover of night, they’d buzz up to larger, slower enemy ships and sting them with 2,600-pound torpedoes. They did have machine guns for defense, but given that flimsy hull, they couldn’t take much fire and relied on speed and cunning instead. In short, working a PT was one of the most dangerous jobs in the navy, and after hearing about Jack’s assignment, Joe grew alarmed at the potential hazard—to himself. The South Pacific was the theater where the navy shined, and his baby brother was virtually guaranteed to win a medal there. Meanwhile, Joe had recently been transferred from Puerto Rico to Norfolk, Virginia—even farther removed from combat than before.
Joe’s shot at redemption arrived in July 1943, when navy officials called a meeting in Norfolk to recruit pilots for a “very dangerous” mission. Joe volunteered immediately, practically standing up on his seat and waving both hands. The mission involved tracking Nazi subs in the Bay of Biscay, off western France. Germany had several submarine pens in the area, and U-boat harassment of Allied shipping was hampering the war effort.
Joe’s mission would be to hunt down and occasionally attack the subs. The hitch was that, because the skies over the bay were crawling with Luftwaffe fighters, he would have to learn to fly a sleeker, more nimble plane. And unfortunately, this plane had one of the most complex cockpits ever devised, with some 50 dials and 150 switches. Most pilots found the details overwhelming—they’d joined the navy to fly, not memorize checklists and punch buttons. The complexity played to Joe’s strengths, however, and he managed to master the controls in just six days. Still, he needed more experience flying the plane before he saw combat, and he got stuck ferrying newly constructed planes from a warehouse in San Diego to Norfolk, the same dull route week after week after week. It’s like piloting for Pan Am, he complained. He could only imagine the sort of glorious danger Jack was getting into.
He didn’t need to imagine for long. The incident is now as much a part of American presidential lore as George Washington’s cherry tree or Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin. On the night of August 2, 1943, Jack’s boat was buzzing around the Solomon Islands and taking potshots at Japanese ships when the destroyer Amagiri (Heavenly Mist) rammed PT-109’s starboard side and splintered her hull. Two of Kennedy’s crew died on impact, and the rest tumbled out into the water. The other PTs in the vicinity scattered, certain that no one could have survived such a wreck.
In fact, eleven had survived, and they found themselves clinging to the scraps of the overturned hull. As the commanding officer, Jack addressed them as they floated in the dark. He first mentioned the possibility of surrendering, saying he wouldn’t judge anyone for doing so: “A lot of you men have families and some of you have children.” As for him, he would try to escape, or fight if it came to that. “I have nothing to lose,” he said. Stirred by his speech, his men voted to join him and set out for the nearest island.
Some swam, and those who had injuries grabbed planks and kicked. One crewman, Patrick McMahon, was so severely burned that he couldn’t do even that, so Jack—despite having suffered injuries himself—took the strap of McMahon’s life vest between his teeth and towed him through the water, straining with his bad back. After four hours battling the waves, the eleven men collapsed onto a spit of sand with the carefree name of Plum Pudding Island. It was dry but offered no food or fresh water; the Japanese patrolled the area anyway, so they couldn’t hide there long. After resting for four hours, Jack—the “limping monkey,” the man who’d gotten into the navy only because his father arranged for a sham medical exam—swam on. He scouted several more islands, then returned to Plum Pudding and rallied his men to make a break for Olasana Island, which at least had coconuts. Another long swim followed, but once again all eleven reached shore.
Unlike the American navy—which had already held a memorial service for PT-109—the Australian navy dispatched two native islanders in canoes to look for the lost crew, just in case. After a series of near misses on various islands, Jack made contact with them, and at the natives’ suggestion, he scratched an SOS message onto a coconut. They paddled off with it, and eight more islanders returned to get Jack himself the next day, hiding him under palm fronds in the belly of their canoe. At last, on the sixth day after the accident, Jack returned with a rescue crew, whooping and hollering as they approached Olasana—“his relief and exhilaration enhanced,” one historian noted, “by a couple of doses of medicinal brandy.” Except for those who’d perished on impact, every last one of his men was saved.
It didn’t take newspapers long to start trumpeting the story of Jack, especially his towing McMahon with his teeth. He became one of the brightest heroes of the war—the ambassador’s son who’d deliberately sought out a dangerous assignment and had acted with incredible courage. He became so famous that, later in the war, Plum Pudding Island was renamed Kennedy Island in his honor.
The only person not impressed was Joe. He refused to ask the family for news of Jack after his rescue, a coldness that infuriated Kennedy Senior. And there was more turmoil to come. A month after the PT-109 wreck, in early September, Kennedy Senior celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Jack was there, having flown home to recover from his injuries (although he never fully would). Joe attended as well, on leave from Norfolk. There was cake, along with presents and drinks, but the climax of the evening came when a close friend of Kennedy Senior, a local judge—the same one who’d tutored Joe at Harvard—toasted the ambassador for his service to his country. He then toasted him again for being “the father of our hero, our own hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy.” A roar went up from everyone there.
Almost everyone. A little later another family friend was walking through the halls of the Kennedy home when he passed a closed bedroom door and stopped short. He thought he could hear someone inside, and suddenly realized who it was—Joe, weeping bitterly.
CHAPTER 32
Blabbermouth
With the diplomat Ernest von Weizsäcker off scheming in the Vatican, Denmark had no champion in Berlin anymore, and in 1943 the political situation there deteriorated quickly. Emboldened by a Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February, the Danish underground stepped up a campaign of sabotage over the next few months. The Nazis retaliated by shooting political prisoners and seizing the Royal Palace. This in turn led to a widespread labor strike in August, at which point Hitler lost patience. He’d always considered the relative freedom of Jews in Denmark “loathsome,” and he demanded corrective action. So in mid-September Gestapo agents broke into the Jewish Community Center in Copenhagen and took one and only one item—a list of names and addresses. A massive raid was in the works.
Unlike virtually every other Nazi raid, however, this one had a happy ending. In one of the most remarkable feats of the war, the Danish underground helped eight thousand Jews—95 percent of the Jewish population of Denmark—disappear overnight on the first of October. Most fled via the sea, piling onto skiffs, barges, and pontoons and floating across the frigid Kattegat Strait to Sweden. When Gestapo squadrons swept into Copenhagen the next morning, they were stunned to find virtually every target on their list missing, including Niels Bohr.
Bohr had actually been smuggled out two nights earlier; a family friend who worked as a clerk for the Gestapo had come across a warrant for his imminent arrest and tipped h
im off. Given the strict curfews in Denmark then—anyone caught outside after dark was shot—he and his wife had left their home during the afternoon, carrying just one bag between them. After a few blocks they passed a man on a street corner who nodded—a signal that the plan was a go. They walked to a field on the edge of town and proceeded to the coast, where they huddled in a small shack on the beach until nightfall. When a fishing boat finally appeared, they crawled across the sand to meet it, then were spirited across the water to Sweden, where they slept the last few hours of the night in an empty prison cell. Bohr’s sons and their families followed in the mass exodus the next night. A granddaughter of Bohr’s was concealed in a shopping basket carried by a Swedish official.
Unfortunately, Bohr was no safer in Stockholm than in Copenhagen. Furious about being outfoxed, the Gestapo ordered him seized at all costs. Bohr’s Danish bodyguards therefore had to shuttle him from place to place within the city, devising elaborate ruses to shake off spies. At one point a taxi took him to a safe house run by Swedish intelligence, where he dashed up to the attic and climbed outside. After crawling across the roofs of several adjacent homes, he arrived at another safe house and slipped inside the attic window, then descended to the street where a different cab was waiting to whisk him away.
It didn’t help matters that Bohr was impossible to keep hidden. He had a gigantic, conspicuous head, and his distinctive mug made him recognizable everywhere in Scandinavia. Worse, Bohr refused to lie low. He kept running off to meetings with Swedish ministers to plead for further aid for Denmark. And although his bodyguards lectured him repeatedly on the need for stealth, Bohr was an incorrigible talker and kept forgetting that he was in hiding. Whenever the phone rang, he’d lunge for it and announce, “This is Bohr.” Increasingly frazzled, his Danish guards turned to officials in Sweden for help. The Swedes, however, pooh-poohed the danger. “This is Stockholm, not Chicago,” one said with a laugh. To which a Danish official answered that he’d trust an American gangster over a Gestapo officer any day of the week.