The Bastard Brigade

by Sam Kean

  Or was it? After poring over the circuit diagrams, the electricians noticed something. Adding the metal pin would prevent the bar from shifting too soon, no question. But it introduced another, potentially worse problem. That’s because the metal bar actually had two purposes: beyond arming the fuses, the movement of the bar also knocked into a nearby switch, which cut off the flow of current through the solenoid. That was necessary because anything with current flowing through it warms up over time. So if a stray radio signal did in fact start current flowing, but the metal pin prevented the bar from moving, then the solenoid would start to get hot. And the hotter it got, the higher the chances it would accidentally trigger one of the nearby fuses. This wouldn’t happen instantly, but tests indicated that after a few minutes—150 seconds—the solenoid would reach a dangerous temperature. They decided to alert Willy.

  This proved to be a bad idea. Willy was an engineering genius, but the stress of running a combat mission was eating at him. Instead of stating his wishes calmly but firmly, as an officer should, he took to shouting at his men like a drill sergeant, often ending commands by barking, “And that’s an order!” Even worse, his judgment had grown erratic. He’d gotten hopelessly turned around on a practice flight a week earlier (ironically, given all its fancy electronics, his plane had a screwy compass), and rather than admit he was lost, he’d blundered into both an antiaircraft battery, which fired on the plane, and an armada of barrage balloons, which nearly sheared the wings off. Two officers more or less mutinied after the second near miss and took over the plane, and at least one man refused to fly with Willy ever again. People seriously questioned his mental health.

  Sure enough, when one of the electricians knocked on Willy’s door and explained his fears about the arming panel, Willy got agitated. He hadn’t designed the arming components himself, but he felt defensive about every aspect of “his” plane. He insisted there was nothing wrong: “I didn’t get to be executive officer of this outfit by being stupid.” When the electrician pressed his case and explained why the metal pin was dangerous, Willy snapped, “Stop playing your games! That’s an order.” The pin would stay.

  The trio of electricians debated what to do now. Two of them tried explaining the problem to Kennedy; as the pilot, he could scrub the mission if he felt unsafe. As enlisted men, though, they felt uncomfortable telling an ambassador’s son what to do, and Joe didn’t really grasp the technical details anyway. Kennedy also had enough responsibilities that week (practice flights, briefings, selecting a flight engineer) without fretting over electronics. My motto at this point, he told one electrician, is “keep quiet and obey orders.” He didn’t want anything mucking up his shot at glory.

  Running out of options, the trio considered sabotaging the electronics—sneaking onto Zootsuit Black and snipping a certain wire, which they calculated would eliminate the threat of early detonation. But Bud Willy had threatened to court-martial them if they altered anything, and he seemed serious. So the electricians swallowed their misgivings and did nothing.

  While this drama played out behind his back, Kennedy kept flying practice runs and overseeing other tasks, including the loading of explosives. Rather than napalm, the mission now planned to use Torpex, a new type of explosive that mixed TNT with aluminum powder, which extended the length and intensity of the blast. Torpex came in blocks that looked like rose-colored butter, and Joe watched a few dozen navy grunts load 347 crates of this deadly colloid onto Zootsuit Black; each box was lined with a beeswax cushion to reduce the likelihood of turbulence setting it off accidentally. With 21,170 pounds of Torpex inside, the plane carried the same firepower as a dozen V-1 rockets.

  Kennedy’s most important task involved selecting his flight engineer, who would help him set up the electronics midflight. He had two bunkmates begging for the job, but he rather coldly cut them out and picked none other than Bud Willy. Willy argued that he was the best man for the job, since he’d designed and tested the remote control and arming/detonation circuits. The engineer’s erratic behavior notwithstanding, Kennedy agreed.

  Kennedy and Willy spent the days before the mission waiting, as usual, for the weather to clear. To distract himself, Joe wrote letters home to his family, assuring them that he wasn’t going to “risk [his] fine neck… in any crazy venture.” He was more honest in a phone call with Lorelle Hearst, a family friend (and the wife of publisher William Randolph Hearst) who was stationed in England as a war correspondent. “I’m about to go into my act,” he told her. “If I don’t come back, tell my dad—despite our differences—that I love him very much.” In between letters, Joe kept listening to the BBC and brooding over General Patton.

  The gloomy weather finally broke on August 12—total CAVU, with sunshine and a glorious blue vault of sky overhead. Kennedy’s buddy Roy Forrest took his plane up that afternoon for a look-see at the bunkers across the Channel and came back smiling. “The Krauts are out sunning themselves on the terrace,” he reported. Everything was finally ready.

  Although it was probably unnecessary—everyone knew the mission cold by then—Kennedy endured one last briefing that afternoon. It took place in a room with a gigantic 3-D model of the Mimoyecques “atomic bunker” mounted on a Ping-Pong table. The attack would take place at sunset, to blind the German antiaircraft crews to the incoming drone. They were aiming for the bunker’s only point of vulnerability, a doorway roughly sixteen feet square—shorter and narrower than the fuselage of the plane.

  While Kennedy was briefed, a few engineers checked over Zootsuit Black, wriggling around among the explosives inside. Finding nothing amiss, they signaled for Joe and Willy to climb aboard. As they did so, Joe solemnly informed them that if anything happened to him up there, they could have his most precious possession: the crate of fresh eggs he’d been hoarding in his locker. Everyone laughed. Joe and Willy then slithered in through a hatch near the nose wheel. It was the same door they’d jump out of an hour later.

  Two mother ships took off at 5:55 and 5:56 p.m. They were followed by a weather plane, two reconnaissance planes with photographers, a plane to mark where the pilot and engineer landed after parachuting out, and five fighter jets, in case of a Nazi sneak attack; in all, a dozen escorts would join Joe and Willy’s baby in the sky. While these aircraft circled above, pilot and engineer spent ten minutes working through various checklists. Then they gave a thumbs-up and taxied to the runway. Joe began rumbling down the strip near the beets and turnips at 6:07, then lifted off. By design he had enough fuel in the tank only for the outbound trip, not the return. One electrician called it “the most beautiful takeoff I’ve ever seen.”

  Zootsuit Black spent the next fifteen minutes banking in a lazy triangle while Joe and Willy made sure the remote-control system worked. It did, and Joe finally spoke the code phrase—“spade flush”—for the mother to take over. This step had failed several times during the Aphrodite flights, but the navy handoff couldn’t have gone more smoothly. Anvil really knew its stuff.

  Kennedy and Willy set about some other tasks now, such as calibrating the autopilot and altimeter. Meanwhile, high above, someone in the mother plane noticed that the baby was a tad off course; he nudged a joystick left to correct its heading. A moment later he felt a rumbling beneath him. Confused, he glanced at the television monitor showing the camera feed from the nose of Zootsuit Black. He saw only static.

  CHAPTER 48

  Catching Pretty Well

  As Moe Berg might have put it, he worked like a Trojan the summer of 1944. Pictures show him looking slimmer than he had in years, closer to his playing weight, and no wonder. Every day in Rome brought new scientists to interview, new documents to translate, new reports to write—on radar and radio, torpedoes and fuses, altimeters and remote-control planes. Berg wrote several drafts of each, then relayed them in breathless cables to Washington that ran up to seventeen single-spaced pages. OSS appreciated the enthusiasm but eventually asked Berg to back off a little. The torrent of dispatches—every
last one labeled TRIPLE PRIORITY—was clogging up their channels of communication. Berg ignored the hint and kept churning.

  That said, Berg did find plenty of time to indulge himself in the Eternal City. OSS put a stylish black car and chauffeur at his disposal, and he stayed at the most luxurious hotel in town, the Excelsior, where he read six Italian newspapers each morning, along with Stars and Stripes. He had an audience with the Pope one day, and gave guided tours of the Vatican art collection to visiting officers. Overall Berg called Rome—which had suffered surprisingly little damage during the occupation—“a ray of sunshine, with no sign of war.”

  He also took field trips for OSS. He poked around several local fishing holes, asking people if they were getting nibbles these days. The ponds sat near hydroelectric plants that OSS suspected might be used for uranium processing; if so, runoff might be killing local fish. Berg then snuck up to Florence to infiltrate an optical plant whose equipment could be repurposed for plutonium experiments. Germany still controlled Florence at that point, so Berg had to travel incognito. As he crossed the famous Ponte Vecchio, he could hear shells exploding in the distance. He did manage to find a hotel that served high tea and had a string quartet playing in the lobby, but for once this level of luxury discomfited him, given that food and even water were scarce citywide.

  Berg’s biggest coup that summer involved tracking down Antonio Ferri, an aerodynamics expert who’d built the galleria ultrasonica, the world’s most advanced wind tunnel. A year earlier, in September 1943, the German military had overrun Ferri’s laboratory. Unlike Frédéric Joliot, Ferri refused to work with the Nazis in any capacity, so he lied his way back inside the lab one day, trashed his own equipment, and fled with the most vital documents. He ended up in the Apennine mountains to the north, where he and his brother (a history professor) organized a band of guerrillas they called Il Spartaco, to resist the Nazi occupation. The two scholars eventually commanded a force of several hundred tatterdemalion troops, who blew bridges, ambushed unwary patrols, and even captured a staff car and several prisoners whom they kept in caves. Tired of this harassment, and eager to retrieve the wind tunnel documents, the Germans offered a handsome ransom for Ferri’s head. No one ever claimed it, and Ferri eluded capture month after month.

  But where the Third Reich had failed, Moe Berg succeeded. He started by wooing Ferri’s mother-in-law in Rome, flattering and charming her, and when the scientist later snuck back into the city, she helped Berg make contact. At their first meeting Berg found Ferri depressed, claiming he wanted to chuck science altogether and become a fireman. Berg soothed and consoled him, then put in time with Ferri’s family to win their trust; he taught Ferri’s children to play baseball. Seeing this kindness, Ferri eventually opened up, and Berg coaxed enough technical details out of him to produce a twelve-page report on wind tunnels for OSS in August. Shortly afterward Berg persuaded Ferri to sign a three-month contract to work in the United States while Italy settled down politically. Due to immigration restrictions, OSS needed President Roosevelt to approve Ferri’s visit. Upon receiving the request, FDR chuckled and said, “I see Berg is still catching pretty well.”

  (Once Ferri landed in New York, of course, American officials refused to let him leave, making excuse after excuse to detain him in the United States. Resigned to his fate, Ferri eventually became a U.S. citizen and went on to make fundamental contributions to American aviation. Most importantly, he helped design the aircraft that allowed Chuck Yeager to break the sound barrier a few years later.)

  Even while snagging top scientists, however, Berg—being Berg—still managed to exasperate his bosses, mostly by disappearing for weeks at a time. The most egregious flake-out occurred in late August, when OSS decided to send him to Paris to make contact with Frédéric Joliot. Officials dispatched cables to every outpost between Casablanca and Florence, asking if anyone had seen their spy. No one had.

  In truth, it was probably for the best that Berg didn’t interfere with Boris Pash again—there might have been a homicide. Besides, OSS was already plotting another, darker mission for its star catcher.

  CHAPTER 49

  “I’ll Be Seeing You”

  On the evening of August 12, 1944, a forty-four-year-old woman named Ada Westgate was chatting with a neighbor outside her home near New Delight Wood, in extreme eastern England, when a plane appeared in the sky. The neighbors were enjoying the end of a lovely summer day, and while they surely noticed the plane—it was flying quite low, making an awful racket—there were always bombers coming and going in those days, and this one probably didn’t make much of an impression. Not until it exploded.

  A gigantic burst of light filled the sky, and the blast that followed must have been staggering—less a noise than a physical blow. Her mind suddenly blurry, Westgate assumed that a V-1 rocket had struck. She lived with a cousin who’d recently fled London after a V-1 destroyed his home there, and she felt sick thinking that he might have been killed out here, in the “safe” part of England. She needed to check on him, and began stumbling toward her front door—only to realize that the door was missing. It had been blown off its hinges into the yard. Lying on the ground beneath it was her cousin.

  He wasn’t hurt, thank God, so after dusting him off, Westgate asked her niece (who also lived with her) to fetch her coat so she could check on some neighbors down the road. The niece shot through the empty doorway and scrambled upstairs, only to hurry back down a moment later. Turns out their upstairs was missing, too. “Aunty,” she cried, “the ceiling’s all down!”

  Until the Trinity nuclear-weapon test eleven months later, Zootsuit Black was the largest bomb explosion in history. A gargantuan green-yellow fireball filled the sky, and shrapnel began streaking out a moment later, including one full engine with its propellers still turning in midair. The resulting shock wave blew the roofs off several houses and shattered windows up to nine miles distant. When the fireball subsided, a gigantic octopus of smoke right out of Revelation replaced it, a thick black cloud with tentacles radiating outward wherever the shrapnel had sailed. Over the following week, local villagers found bits of the plane up to a mile away from the epicenter. No one ever found a speck of human remains; the closest they came was some parachute silk tangled in a tree.

  Given who Joe Kennedy’s father was, the disaster resulted in what one witness called “the most intensive investigation I have ever seen.” The navy prepared two separate reports, hired electronics experts from RCA and CBS to write another, and then farmed each one out for comments. No one will ever really know what caused the explosion, but the reports did eliminate some theories, including sabotage, gasoline leaks, sparks of static electricity from nearby clouds, and stray bullets from the ground. Instead, they mostly zeroed in on the arming panel. The British had been trying to jam German communication lines with radio waves, so a stray signal might well have activated the arming circuit. And just as the electricians feared, the solenoid near the metal pin had likely heated up and triggered the detonator. Why the explosion happened when it did—just after the mother ship nudged Zootsuit Black to the left—remains unknown; perhaps it was coincidence.

  The Kennedy family learned none of this. On August 13 they were staying at their compound in Hyannis Port, the same place where Joe had broken down in tears of frustration over his brother’s heroism. Bing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” was playing on the phonograph when Joe’s mother, Rose, saw a dark sedan pull up. Two navy chaplains stepped out. She ran upstairs to get Kennedy Senior, who was napping. He came down, heard the news from the chaplains, and ran right back upstairs, already sobbing. Everyone else started breaking down, too. The only one who kept his head was Jack. He grabbed his twelve-year-old brother Teddy by the hand and said, “Joe wouldn’t want us sitting here crying. He would want us to go sailing.” Teddy would always remember that kindness.

  Just as he’d promised in his final letters, Joe got a medal for the mission, the Navy Cross. He’d finally equaled his ki
d brother. But for security reasons, and perhaps to mask their mistakes, the navy told the Kennedys nothing about Joe’s mission or why it had failed, only that he’d volunteered for it and died a hero. But Kennedy Senior’s fear in 1939 had proved prescient: the war he’d never wanted had taken away his favorite son.

  Incredibly, Project Anvil continued after Joe Kennedy and Bud Willy died. But every single subsequent flight failed as well, and Anvil’s final record looked as bleak as Aphrodite’s: combined, the two missions went 0 for 18 with the flying bombs. As historians have noted, the missions did more damage to the English countryside than to the concrete bunkers in France.

  Meanwhile, the battle to stop the V-weapons raged on. As noted, the Germans fired V-1s from several sites across northern France, and Allied troops finally overran most of them in late summer 1944. This quieted the skies above England, and by September 7, Churchill’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys felt confident enough to announce that “except possibly for a few last shots,” the V-rocket threat was over.

  Famous last words. The V-2 barrage started the next night. The first one landed in West London at 6:30 p.m. Hundreds more followed over the next few months, and the British quickly realized just how dire these new weapons were. Because they held more explosives, they packed a bigger punch, and because they approached at such incredible speeds (around 3,500 miles per hour), no one could hear them coming, let alone shoot them down. Worst of all, because the Germans fired them from mobile launch pads, they were all but impossible to eradicate. Despite the Allies’ best efforts, the Reich continued to fire V-2s almost until the end of the war, killing 134 people as late as March 1945. One exploded just a half mile from General von Thoma’s cushy POW camp at Trent Park. As he’d predicted, England suddenly had more “fun” than she could handle.