Joseph E. Persico (50 page)

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The President ran into resistance from Churchill on another secret operation. He cabled the Prime Minister in March 1944, reminding him that the U.S. and British military had been cooperating on a pilotless, remote-controlled bomber “to be launched against large industrial targets in Germany, each bomber to be loaded with some 20,000 pounds of high explosives and set on course to target. . . .” But the British chiefs of staff reneged and persuaded Churchill to back off from the deal. As Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal put it, “[T]he possibility of retaliation against the unique target of London had been felt to outweigh the advantages of the employment of this weapon.” To FDR, such reasoning was naïve. He reminded Churchill that the Allies already knew Germany was building new weapons to strike England, their development slowed but not stopped by Allied air raids. “. . . [I]f the enemy were to take effective measures against the cities of England with this type of weapon,” Roosevelt argued, “he would have done so regardless of any use by us of pilotless aircraft.” One week after D-Day, FDR was proved right when the Germans launched the first of eight thousand pilotless V-1 buzz bombs against London. In the meantime, the Americans continued to develop their flying bomb, and Roosevelt advised Churchill that its use would not end in Europe: “Combat experience with this weapon on the continent will make possible the most effective use of this type of weapon in the battle against the highly concentrated areas of the Japanese homeland.” The President urged “that you ask your Chiefs of Staff to consider their withdrawal of concurrence on this project.” Churchill gave his lukewarm consent.

A handsome, dark-haired twenty-nine-year-old American Navy pilot, with two combat tours of duty already completed and with orders to return home, volunteered instead to train for the flying bomb project. The pilot was Lieutenant Joseph Kennedy Jr., the son of FDR's former ambassador to Great Britain. Kennedy had already been recommended for a Navy medal for valor and the President had graciously agreed to pin it on him in a White House ceremony. The event did not come off because, in the end, Joe Sr. decided that it would be unwise to show his son special attention. Nevertheless, the President's willingness marked an upward tick in the ever fluctuating relations between FDR and his former ambassador. The low point had been reached three years before, after Kennedy had returned home from London and before the United States entered the war. Kennedy had addressed the graduating class at Notre Dame in the spring of 1941, after which the White House received a letter from someone who claimed to have heard Kennedy's off-the-record remarks. According to this informant, Kennedy had said, “. . . Hitler was the greatest genius of the century. . . . [His] diplomatic ability was superior to anything the British could hope to muster. . . . Britain is hopelessly licked and there will be a negotiated peace within sixty days.” It was hearsay. Still, the reported comments rang true to the Joe Kennedy of 1941.

Not to be outdone, Bill Donovan was also exploring a remote-controlled weapon that would employ even newer technology. Rudimentary television broadcasting had been carried out by the BBC in England as early as 1937; and FDR had watched faint, flickering images on the embryonic receiver in the snuggery at Hyde Park. But television had not yet been enlisted in the war. Stanley Lovell, Donovan's science chief, saw an opportunity. In a joint OSS/Army Air Corps report, Lovell noted, “Harbors sheltering naval and merchant vessels . . . are highly protected. Against attack from the air there will be concentrations of anti-aircraft and machine gun fire. Barrage balloons over docks and ships prevent low-level attack. . . . To make successful attacks against specific targets in defended harbors without prohibitive losses in men and equipment requires a different mode of attack.” Lovell and Air Corps engineers believed they had the answer in a project ultimately called Javaman. The man Donovan chose as project officer to ride herd on the mission was an OSS Navy lieutenant commander, John Shaheen, a twenty-nine-year-old coil of energy born on a farm in Illinois but who, with his small, dark appearance, reflecting Middle Eastern antecedents, could more easily have passed unnoticed in Cairo than in a cornfield. Shaheen and the Javaman team set to work developing a thirty-four-foot light, high-powered motorboat capable of speeds up to forty-five miles per hour that would have a television camera mounted on its forward deck affording a twenty-six-degree field of vision. The boat was to have a rusty, seaworn aspect, allowing it to pass as a fishing craft or other innocuous vessel. The hold was to be crammed with eight thousand pounds of high explosives. The boat would be launched from a mother ship some twenty miles from an enemy port. From then on, it would be radio-controlled by a plane flying up to fifty miles distant. A television receiver installed aboard the plane would display whatever the camera on the boat deck saw. Once a warship or large merchantman was spotted, the remote controller in the plane would bring the boat to top speed and use the television image to guide it to explode against its target.

By June 17, 1944, eleven days after D-Day, Shaheen reported to Donovan that test runs conducted at the Navy's Little Creek Mine Command in Virginia had succeeded and that the Army had provided sixteen expendable Hacker boats for Project Javaman. Only a few final glitches remained to be worked out.

In the meantime, the Air Force's flying bomb project had graduated from experimental to operational. The first six missions failed, with loss of life and aircraft. On August 12 the first mission organized by the Navy, called Aphrodite, was launched. A PB4Y-1 Liberator lifted off from a concrete runway at Fersfield aerodrome in southern England, destined for a V-1 launching site near the French coast. The crew consisted of the pilot, Lieutenant Kennedy, and the co-pilot, a thirty-five-year-old regular Navy officer and father of three, Lieutenant Wilford J. Willy of Fort Worth, Texas. Tightly packed behind them were ten tons of explosives. With them flew several escort aircraft. Once under way, Kennedy and Willy would bail out and an escort plane would then use remote-control radio to guide the explosives-laden Liberator to crash into the launching site. Flying among the escorts was Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, the President's son. Just twenty-eight minutes after takeoff, while still over the English coast, Colonel Roosevelt saw a blinding flash. The Kennedy Liberator burst into a fireball and fell to earth near the village of Newdelight Woods. Why the plane exploded prematurely was never determined and the bodies of Kennedy and Willy were never recovered. For years, the cause of Kennedy's and Willy's deaths was veiled in mystery because British military officials did not want their people to know that planes packed with explosives, under shaky radio control, were flying over the country.

The President sent Joe Kennedy Sr. his condolences, and, later, a destroyer was named for Joe Jr. But the elder Kennedy remained grief-stricken and embittered by the loss of his first son, in whom he had invested great dreams, including, someday, possibly the presidency of the United States. That fall of 1944, Senator Harry Truman, in Boston campaigning as FDR's vice presidential running mate, invited Joe Kennedy to join him at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel for a chat and to put the arm on the wealthy ex-ambassador for a campaign contribution. Kennedy, wearing a tam-o'-shanter, marched into Truman's suite and immediately began to berate Roosevelt. “Harry,” he snarled, “what the hell are you doing campaigning for that crippled son-of-a-bitch that killed my son Joe?”

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Flying bombs and floating missiles were as firecrackers alongside the hopes for the Manhattan Project. The atom bomb was supposed to be the most tightly guarded secret of the war. Yet, the President was disconcerted to discover that someone as uninvolved as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter knew what was happening at Los Alamos. Frankfurter had first learned of the Manhattan Project through a young physicist working on it named Irving Lowen. Lowen had earlier talked himself into Eleanor Roosevelt's Washington Square apartment in New York where he urged the First Lady to warn the President that Germany was ahead in the race for an atomic bomb. Lowen later took his fears to the justice. Even then, the field of physics was not entirely foreign to Frankfurter. During a year at Oxford in the early thirties, he had become friends with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, a 1922 Nobel Prize winner now trapped in Nazi-occupied Denmark.

Eager to exploit Bohr's expertise, British atomic scientists plotted to spirit him out of his homeland to work on Tube Alloys. The physicist initially resisted. But when Hitler ordered the roundup of Danish Jews, Bohr's conscience was stirred. His mother was a Jew. The British secret service arranged for Bohr to slip into neutral Sweden by boat, and then bundled him into the bomb bay of a British Mosquito bomber. He arrived in England on October 6, 1943. Bohr subsequently went to America at the urging of Sir John Anderson, then heading Tube Alloys research in England. Bohr's mission was twofold, to lend his knowledge of nuclear physics to the Manhattan Project and to uphold Britain's full partnership in development of the bomb. On his arrival, Bohr was astounded at the speed with which Robert Oppenheimer's team was proceeding toward its goal. He told the Americans, incorrectly, that he was certain the Germans were building a bomb, which further spurred the Manhattan Project. By now, Bohr had also developed a political position on the bomb. He believed that the United States and Britain should bring Russia into the secret. Soviet scientists, too, he knew, were involved in atomic research. Should Russia learn that its Western allies were hogging the secret, attempting, in effect, to achieve a monopoly, the result would be, Bohr predicted, a nuclear arms race. The swift pace of work at Los Alamos only convinced him further of the need to bring the Russians in on the project.

After leaving Los Alamos, Bohr went to Washington to meet his friend Felix Frankfurter, who invited him to lunch in his Supreme Court chambers. The justice, a short, sharp-witted, agnostic Zionist, explained that he had been approached by scientists seeking advice on some of the political problems raised by a certain project involving atomic energy. Frankfurter and Bohr pussyfooted around the forbidden subject until the jurist made a reference to Project X, another code name for the Manhattan Project. They now knew that each shared the secret. Bohr, aware of Frankfurter's closeness to Roosevelt, took the opportunity to reiterate his concern that the Allies' most covert operation had to be shared with a Communist regime for the sake of postwar peace.

Bohr returned to England, where on May 16, 1944, he managed to obtain a meeting with Churchill. According to an eyewitness account by Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Foreign Office advisor to the Prime Minister, they met a ponderous old gentleman who presented his argument in incomprehensible physics jargon, and then looked up hopefully for understanding. “He talked inaudibly for three-quarters of an hour—about what, I haven't the faintest idea,” Cadogan later wrote. Churchill's thoughts, at the time, were entirely consumed with last-minute plans for the invasion of Normandy, and here was a rambling old Dane pressing the mad idea of giving away the secrets of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union. The Prime Minister, through his own intelligence channels, had learned that a leading Soviet scientist, Peter Kapitsa, had invited Bohr to come to work on the Russians' own atomic project, under way since 1942. Anything Bohr required, Kapitsa had promised, would be his. The Dane declined, but knowledge of the offer did little to assuage Churchill. After the meeting, he carped at Lord Cherwell, his scientific advisor, “I did not like the man when you showed him to me, with his hair all over his head, at Downing Street.”

By June the peripatetic Bohr was back in the United States. Felix Frankfurter, in a “Dear Frank” letter dated July 10, pleaded with FDR to see the physicist. His strongest case was that Bohr possessed information “pointing to a feverish German activity on nuclear problems.” The Nazis' progress, Bohr feared, would soon be known to the Russians. Better Stalin should learn of the possibilities of the bomb from his ally, America, than from the enemy, Frankfurter argued. He included along with his handwritten letter to FDR a long memorandum that Bohr had sweated over in a humid Washington hotel room, a document as impenetrable as his speech.

On August 26, FDR met with Bohr and his physicist son, Aage. After the gruff reception the Dane had received at the hands of Churchill, he was apprehensive about Roosevelt's reaction to him. But FDR displayed his patented charm, regaling his visitors with stories about his dealings with Churchill and Stalin at Tehran. He also gave the two men all the time they needed to present their case. Bohr and his son left FDR's office after an hour and a half full of optimism. As Aage Bohr later recorded the encounter, “Roosevelt agreed that an approach to the Soviet Union of the kind suggested must be tried, and said that he had the best hopes that such a step would achieve a favourable result. In his opinion Stalin was enough of a realist to understand the revolutionary importance of this scientific and technical advance. . . .” As for the pounding Bohr had taken at Churchill's hands, Aage Bohr added, “Roosevelt said he and Churchill always managed to reach agreement and he thought that Churchill would eventually come around to sharing his point of view in this matter.” Niels Bohr had even been led to believe that Roosevelt, if Churchill concurred, might ask him “to undertake an exploratory mission to the Soviet Union.” The physicist had experienced the facet of the Roosevelt persona that desired to be all things to all people.

Shortly after this encounter, Roosevelt and Churchill held their second meeting at Quebec in September 1944. Afterward, the Prime Minister traveled down to Hyde Park along with Mrs. Churchill and their daughter Mary. He looked forward to both the serenity of Roosevelt's riverside estate and the chance to resolve privately a dangling concern. Lunch was served immediately upon the Churchill's arrival, and another Roosevelt guest turned out to be the Duke of Windsor. Whatever doubts Churchill had about the loyalty or good sense of his former monarch, he nevertheless behaved toward the duke with deference and cordiality. Amid the sparkling conversation, however, the current governor of the Bahamas was not to be made privy to anything of significance.