The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [128]
Joe Jr. knew how deeply his father cared for him. When Joe Jr. won his wings in Jacksonville, his father had come up from Palm Beach to address the graduates. Joe had been in the middle of his speech when he looked at his beloved son there in that row of splendid young men, and he had come close to crying. That was a measure of how proud Joe was of his son and of how deeply he feared for his life.
Joe Jr. was a better brother to his siblings than Jack. He thought about them. He wrote them. He cared. He may have been a stickler for regulations, yet when seventeen-year-old Bobby came down to visit his big brother, Joe Jr. snuck him onto the base and took him out for a patrol, letting his kid brother handle the controls from the co-pilot’s seat. Joe Jr. might have been court-martialed if the brass had found out, but he was willing to chance that to let Bobby feel what it was to fly.
Joe Jr. blocked out much of the world that did not lead him toward high honor. As a pilot, he had no time for pleasantries. He strode across the hot tarmac not even acknowledging the airmen and mechanics with a nod. He had little use for most of his flight instructors, seeing them as little more than means to an end. To his crews, he was a merciless perfectionist who treated them like imperfect machines.
Whatever his detractors thought, Joe Jr. was no brass-polishing sycophant who thought that through social guile he might succeed. He sought action, and he did what he felt he had to do to stand at the front of that line where he believed a man could prove himself. It was not his fault that he was piloting flying boats, lumbering craft ideal for long reconnaissances far from the retort of angry Nazi guns or menacing Luftwaffe fighter planes. On one of his trips to Virginia Beach, where he had rented an apartment, he had a talk with Mark Soden, a fellow officer, about why he felt he must stand one day in the full line of fire. He talked about what it had been like in Madrid at the end with the bullets so near, and how so much was expected of him in this war. He was a child of wealth and privilege, and in this war he felt he had to prove himself worthy of the rich bounty of his life.
Joe Jr. was not all self-absorbed purposefulness. As long as he stood far from the arenas of heroism, he made the most of his leaves, turning his apartment in Virginia Beach into fertile ground for assignations. “He had a special friend in Norfolk, a married woman whose officer husband was away,” recalled Soden. “I think sometimes Joe felt it was safer with a married woman than with a single person, no pressure.”
“Joe was what we liked to call a prime cocks man,” reflected another officer, Robert Duffy. “He was down there in Virginia Beach as often as he could.”
In mid-July, Joe Jr.’s commander, Jim Reedy, called his crews together in a hangar at Norfolk to tell them the dramatic news. Reedy would be heading a new command, Patrol Squadron 110 (VB-110). Their job would be to hunt down Nazi submarines as they left their bases in the southern French ports on the Bay of Biscay and headed out to maim allied shipping. Their weapon would be not the vulnerable flying boat but the B-24 Liberator. The plane, rechristened the PB4Y-1 by the navy, was a squat, four-engine, thirty-ton bomber. “No one is compelled to accept this assignment,” the men were told. “Undoubtedly it will be a dangerous one.” The pilots knew that they faced a double challenge—not only the dangers of combat but the immediate task of learning how to fly the confounded thing. Not a man backed away, and none of the pilots was as gung-ho as Joe Jr.
During the next six weeks, just when Jack was first tasting combat, Joe Jr. was up in the sky above Norfolk learning how to fly the unwieldy monolith. He would probably have been a better PT-boat captain than a pilot of a PB4Y, but he was a dogged trainee who kept