Lost Destiny: Joe Kennedy Jr. and the Doomed WWII Mission to Save London by Alan Axelrod

Author:Alan Axelrod [Axelrod, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Drones of August

Four babies were slated to fly on the afternoon of August 4, 1944, manned by four two-person crews, with one standby crew available. As they had so many times before, the mother ship and jump crews filed into the briefing hut after breakfast. (“Say, what’d you have for breakfast?” Fain Pool asked his electronics expert, Staff Sergeant Phil Enterline. “Everything except eggs Benedict,” he answered. Pool laughed: “The condemned men ate a hearty meal.”1)

Inside the briefing hut, laid out on an array of Ping-Pong tables, were three-dimensional models of the targets assigned to the four sorties collectively designated Mission 515. Having been repeatedly summoned to the hut and briefed, only to have the mission scrubbed on account of weather, the pilots and crews were thoroughly familiar with all of the targets. Indeed, the targets made no difference whatsoever to the jump crews. After taking off and leveling first at 1,800 feet, the jump pilot was to fly a rectangular pattern over the English countryside while his electronics expert set up the autopilot and ACE radio altimeter, then bailed out. The jump pilot would point the aircraft in the direction of the French coast, put it into a gentle dive, set the autopilot to level off at 300 feet, radio the code word “Taxisoldier” to the mother ship to signal that he was leaving his seat, and would then arm the nitrostarch load both manually and electronically before exiting from the navigator’s escape hatch. The jump crew would never even see the target.

Major General Earle Partridge, commanding the Third Bomb Division, and Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle, Eighth Air Force CO, both attended the briefing and would both fly their own P-38s to observe the mission. Their effort was more than a show of curiosity. Together, they had overseen planning for the extensive support the missions would receive. Much of the time, in the days leading up to August 4, the men of Aphrodite had felt lonely and alone, cut loose by the British and isolated from the rest of the base. Today, however, the Royal Air Force was devoting 250 of its bombers to a diversionary raid against targets of plausible—if not compelling—importance north of Paris. The raid was to commence at three in the afternoon, precisely when the Aphrodite babies would be taking off, in flight, or even beginning their impacts into their targets. The idea was to draw as much of the Luftwaffe as far away from the attacks as possible. In addition, sixteen twin-engine P-38 Lightning fighters—an aircraft whose unconventional twin-boom fuselage prompted Luftwaffe pilots to call it der Gabelschwanz-Teufel (fork-tailed devil)—were dispatched to fly cover for the mother ships. More B-17s were sent up for observation and navigation, each of which was also assigned its own fighter cover. Four additional P-38s, equipped for photoreconnaissance, were tasked with capturing the mission in still photos and movies. Two RAF Mosquitoes were specifically detailed to photograph the exit of the two aircrew. Like the P-38, the de Havilland Mosquito was a twin-engine, twin-boom aircraft.

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