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

Lost Destiny

Joe Kennedy Jr. and the Doomed WWII Mission to Save London

Alan Axelrod

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For Anita and Ian

Contents

Chapter 9

Prologue

A Birdcage, Still Hanging in a Window with a Little Dead Canary in It

Everyone knewthe world knew, the Germans certainly knewthat 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 sixthe end of teatimehaving 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 housethose all around were bomb blasted, and I saw this woman cleaning the front doorstep of her demolished house as if it were business as 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 citiesmost horrifically Coventry, on November 14, 1940would 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 wasnt 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 corditeit was an unmistakable smell.... I was in my pyjamasand I hadnt 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 ships 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 ships nurse, as in his view she was dead... [but] I didnt really want to let go of her because I felt that I would then 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 shapeso faintly at first that we werent sure we saw correctlythe gigantic dome of St. Pauls Cathedral. St. Pauls was surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportionsgrowing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before 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

The Londoners Pyle encountered were stoic and heroic. Bad as the St. Pauls 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 cant go on like this. Weve got to seek peace. He was practically in tears.

Do you realize, Harris asked him, that youre playing right into Hitlers hands? This is just what hes 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 inand go up the road and tell somebody and you do the same to somebody elsenow, youd get people in the state of mind and their morale goes. What youve got to do is remember what Im telling myselfthis is my war effort. And this is your war effort. Buck up.... Weve 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 childrens prams which theyd filled with little things theyd rescued from their homes. There were no tearsnothing whatsoeverjust firmnessWell rescue what we can. They were all rightbut what got me into tears was a birdcage, still hanging in a window with a little dead canary in 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 todays money to purchase the controlling shares of Columbia Trust Bank, thereby becoming, at age twenty-five, the countrys 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 Steels Quincy, Massachusetts, shipyarda 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 wars 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 torrid three-year affair with movie star Gloria Swanson. In the meantime, he managed to buy the sixty-three highly profitable Pantages theaters at a fire-sale price during the spectacular rape trial of theatrical mogul Alexander Pantages. Eventually acquitted, Pantages later claimed Kennedy had framed him just to drive down his asking price.