The Top-Secret World War II Mission That Killed Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the Heir Apparent to the Political Dynasty

Pelican Press · August 12, 2024

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The Top-Secret World War II Mission That ******* Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the Heir Apparent to the Political Dynasty

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Meilan Solly

Associate Editor, History

By all accounts, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.’s war should have been over.

As Allied forces advanced on the Western Front in the summer of 1944, the Navy lieutenant completed his

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—twice the number required to fulfill a tour of duty abroad. Instead of returning home to the ******* States, however, he volunteered for a

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named after Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty.

“I am going to do something different for the next three weeks,” Joe Jr.

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in a letter to his parents. “It is secret and I am not allowed to say what it is, but it isn’t dangerous, so don’t worry.” Somewhat wary in his response to his eldest son, the lieutenant’s father, former Ambassador to the ******* Kingdom

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,

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, “I can quite understand how you feel about staying there … but don’t force your luck too much.”

Three days after Joe Sr. wrote his reply, the hollowed-out aircraft carrying Joe Jr. and his co-pilot exploded over England, ******** both men. The mission represented a fatal ******** for Operation Aphrodite, which sought to transform battle-worn ******** into uncrewed,

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missiles—in essence, early drones.

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The last known photograph of Joe Jr., taken on the day of his ******, August 12, 1944

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Joe Jr. in uniform

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On a more personal level, Joe Jr.’s ****** at age 29 dealt a staggering ***** to his father’s grand dreams for the future. Groomed for the presidency since his birth, Joe Jr. had served as a delegate at the 1940 Democratic National Convention, with plans to run for Congress after the war. Upon hearing the news of his brother’s demise, John F. Kennedy, the family’s second-oldest son, reportedly

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, “Now the burden falls on me.”

Previously “considered too ‘sloppy,’ fun-loving and physically unhealthy” for a career in politics, in the words of the London

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, John secured seats in the House of Representative and the Senate before narrowly winning the

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presidential election, becoming the first Irish ********* commander in chief and the youngest person elected to the nation’s highest office to date.

“Just as I went into politics because Joe *****,” John

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in an eerily prescient remark, “if anything happened to me tomorrow, my brother

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would run. … And if Bobby *****,

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would take over for him.”

Born on July 25, 1915,

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was the first child of Joe Sr., a wealthy businessman and prominent Massachusetts politician, and

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, the daughter of a Boston mayor. The oldest of nine, Joe Jr. bore “a certain forcefulness of character that marked him as a natural leader” even in his youth,

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Rose in her memoir. His younger siblings looked up to him, and he, in turn, set a strong example for them by excelling in school and sports. Still, Rose

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, Joe Jr. “got into his share of mischief,” particularly when partnered with John, who was two years his junior. In 1923, the brothers wrote a song about bedbugs and cooties and started a club with a steep entry fee: To be initiated into the organization, new members had to consent to getting stuck with pins.

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L to R: Joe Jr., Kathleen Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy and John in Cohasset, Massachusetts, circa 1926 or 1927

Both Joe Jr. and John attended Choate, a prestigious boarding school in Connecticut. There, Joe Jr. played football and edited the student yearbook. Before enrolling at Harvard University, his father’s alma mater, he spent the 1933 to 1934 school year studying under ******* political scientist

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at the

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.

Joe Jr.’s time in Europe coincided with the rise of Adolf *******; when he visited Germany, he learned about the Nazis’

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—a policy he praised for doing “away with many of the disgusting specimens of men which inhabit this earth.” According to historian

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, Joe Jr. “held quite ************* views about the disabled,” a stance that was surprising given his close relationship with his younger sister

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, who had intellectual disabilities. Despite Joe Jr.’s similarly respectful attitude toward Laski, he also espoused antisemitic sentiment,

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that ******* had offered the “scattered, despondent and … divorced from hope” Germans a common ******. “It was excellent psychology, and it was too bad that it had to be done to the Jews,” Joe Jr. wrote to his father. “This dislike of Jews, however, was well founded.”

Joe Jr. graduated from Harvard in 1938, then joined his family in London, where his father was serving as the U.S. ambassador. In February 1939, the 23-year-old traveled to Madrid, arriving soon after a shelling by insurgents fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Not dispatched on official business, he was “just looking around,” Joe Sr. told the

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, adding, “His mother will **** when she hears he is in Madrid.”

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The Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in 1931. Joe Jr. is in the back row at right.

Richard Sears / John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

The following year, Joe Jr.

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as a DNC delegate who pledged to vote for Postmaster General

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over incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt. Under pressure to switch his allegiance to the president, particularly as the son of an ambassador

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, he remained steadfast in his choice, believing that no commander in chief should be allowed to serve three terms. The burgeoning politician’s conduct at the convention won him the admiration of prominent attendees, one of whom

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Joe Sr. that his son “seemed to gain the respect of everybody there,” adding, “I am sure he can have a political future if he wants one.”

Though Joe Jr.

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to Harvard for

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, he ultimately decided to enlist in the Navy as a pilot in June 1941 instead of finishing his degree. Prompted in part by his father’s

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to the U.S.’s entry into World War II—a scenario that seemed increasingly likely in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor—he defended his decision in a

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to Joe Sr.: “With your stand on the war, … people will wonder what the ****** I am doing back at school with everyone else working for national defense.” John soon followed in his older brother’s footsteps, relying on his family connections to secure a position in the

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, despite back issues that would normally have barred him from serving. When the U.S. finally joined the war in December 1941, both brothers were partway through naval training.

“Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. to Get Naval ‘Wings’ Today as Dad Looks On,” read a May 5, 1942, headline in the

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. The title telegraphed the family dynamics at play, underscoring the pressure placed on Joe Jr. by his father, whose presence and influence loomed large. Adding to the weight of Joe Sr.’s expectations was the surprising military success of John, who received a promotion to lieutenant and command of his own boat by the end of 1942. As his younger brother

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patrolling for ********* ships in the Solomon Islands, Joe Jr. was relegated to a naval air base in Virginia, where he launched lower-risk patrols in search of ******* U-boats.

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Joe Jr. on the campus of Harvard University in 1938

Bettmann via Getty Images

On the night of August 1, 1943, a ********* destroyer rammed into John’s boat, PT-109, knocking its crew into the water and ripping the starboard side clean off. Then 26 years old, Kennedy exhibited

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during the incident, leading the 11 surviving sailors to a nearby island before swimming, sometimes solo, to neighboring islands in search of food and aid.

The

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, the

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, and

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and family alike praised John as a hero. But while Joe Jr. was certainly glad that his younger brother had escaped ******, he felt overshadowed and was eager to prove himself. “Colleagues commented later on his intense preoccupation with putting himself in harm’s way, and thus on the path to publicly recognized heroism,”

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in

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. As fellow pilot Louis Papas later recalled, “There was never an occasion for a mission that meant extra hazard that Joe did not volunteer. He had everybody’s unlimited admiration and respect for his courage, zeal and willingness to undertake the most dangerous missions.”

Sent to Great Britain in September 1943, Joe Jr. spent the next several months

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over the Atlantic, the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay, piloting PB4Y Liberator ******** on anti-submarine details. By May 1944, he’d flown the 25 missions required for reassignment to the U.S., losing his co-pilot and numerous colleagues to ****** anti-aircraft ***** in the process. Though he had permission to return home, he opted to stay in the ******. As he

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his parents in mid-June, “I now have 39 missions and will probably have 50 by the time I leave. It is far more than anyone else on the base, but it doesn’t prove a ***** of a lot.”

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John (left) and Joe Jr. in their naval uniforms

Hulton Archive / Getty Images

In the summer of 1944, Joe Jr. volunteered first for

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, an air patrol connected to the Allied invasion of France, and then for Operation Aphrodite and its Navy counterpart, Operation Anvil. The top-secret project was aimed at taking down the Nazis’ steel-reinforced concrete bunkers in occupied France, from which the Germans were launching their devastating

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cruise missiles and

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ballistic missiles. Uncrewed, gyro-controlled jets packed with explosives, the projectiles offered a low-risk way of

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the British from afar.

Commander James Doolittle, of the Army’s Eighth Air Force, suggested converting war-weary ******** into pilotless missiles. “Control and autopilot technology [were] sufficiently immature to make the … program incredibly risky, but the perceived benefits justified the potential costs,” wrote

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, a curator at the Smithsonian’s

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, in a 2014

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. Though the ******** were

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, they required a two-person crew to get the aircraft off the ground and ensure it stayed on course.

When Joe Jr. heard about the operation, he readily volunteered for it. According to an

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by a fellow officer, the lieutenant, “regarded as an experienced Patrol Plane Commander and … an expert in radio control projects,” was tasked with piloting “a ‘drone’

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bomber loaded with 21,170 pounds of high explosives into the air and [staying] with it until two ‘mother’ planes had achieved complete radio control over the ‘drone.’” After completing this transfer of control, Joe Jr. and co-pilot

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were supposed to bail out over England, parachuting to safety as the plane continued on to the V-1 bunkers.

WWII 8TH AIR FORCE DRONE AIRCRAFT AS FLYING ****** “FLYING DESTRUCTION BY REMOTE CONTROL” 42000

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The motley group of Allied aircraft needed for the mission—among them a

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carrying the president’s second-oldest son,

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, who was tasked with capturing the flight on film—took off from a Royal Air Force base shortly after 6 p.m. on August 12, 1944. Eighteen minutes into the mission, Joe Jr. shared a message over the radio: “Spade Flush,” the code phrase for the bomber to be handed off to the mother ship. At approximately

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, as Joe Jr. and ****** awaited the signal to bail out, two explosions rocked the plane, ******** the pilots and nearly destroying the other aircraft in the formation. The pair’s bodies were never found.

The accident was “the biggest ********** I ever saw until the pictures of the atom *****,” a pilot on board the mother ship

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. No one on the ground was hurt, but debris from the wreck rained down on the English countryside, with one local

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an “enormous ****** pall of smoke resembling a huge octopus, the tentacles below indicating the earthward paths of burning fragments.” The cause of the disaster was never identified, but mechanical ******** was a leading theory.

Operation Aphrodite continued through

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, with

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. In recognition of the pilots’ sacrifice, the government awarded Joe Jr. and ****** the

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, the second-highest military decoration. John, meanwhile, won the

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, the highest non-combat award for heroism, for his actions aboard PT-109.

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Joe Jr. sitting in an aircraft during training in 1941

Bettmann via Getty Images

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John and his wife, Jackie Kennedy, watch a boat race while on board the USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., a destroyer named in Joe Jr.’s honor

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The Kennedys deeply

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Joe Jr.’s ******. With no body to bury and scant details of his final moments (the mission

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until after the war), the family commemorated their eldest son with a privately published book titled

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. In the text, John—now the heir apparent—wrote:

It may be felt, perhaps, that Joe should not have pushed his luck so far and should have accepted his leave and come home. But two facts must be borne in mind. First, at the time of his ******, he had completed probably more combat missions in heavy ******** than any other pilot of his rank in the Navy and therefore was preeminently qualified, and secondly, as he told a friend early in August, he considered the odds at least 50-50, and Joe never asked for any better odds than that.

Despite the grief he felt over Joe Jr.’s ******, Joe Sr. remained resolute in his ambitions for his family. “We’ve got to carry on,” he

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his wife. “We must take care of the living. There is a lot of work to be done.” According to legend, Joe Sr. called John into a meeting, where he announced that the younger son would take his brother’s place as the family’s representative on the national stage. “It was like being drafted,” the future president later

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. “My father wanted his oldest son in politics. ‘Wanted’ isn’t the right word. He demanded it. You know my father.”

Joe Jr., for his part, had seemingly predicted how events would play out in the event of his ******. In a letter written just before his enlistment in the Navy, he wryly

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, “It seems that Jack is perfectly capable to do everything, if by chance anything happened to me.”

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#TopSecret #World #War #Mission #******* #Joseph #Kennedy #Heir #Apparent #Political #Dynasty

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The Top-Secret World War II Mission That Killed Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the Heir Apparent to the Political Dynasty

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