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By Root 1625 0

their thirty-five missions. Joe Jr., however, wanted to be there for D-Day, when he might have his moment of heroism. And so, on June 6, he flew as part of a massive grid protecting the invading forces from German submarines that might work their way into the midst of the mightiest armada in history, wreaking havoc and death and threatening the whole operation. His orders were to fly at fifteen hundred feet near Cherbourg, a city in northwest France far from the Normandy beaches, but the flotilla was so enormous that he could spot some of the ships far out on the horizon. He saw no submarines that day or on the many sorties that followed during the invasion month. On one sortie he spotted five German torpedo boats. He could easily have swooped down and destroyed them. He was just one square in the gigantic grid, however, and his orders were to keep to his patrol and leave it to other planes. He did what he was told, as did the other pilots, and in the end not one ship out of the entire invading force was lost to the German submarines. Joe Jr.’s month was coming to a close, and on his final flights he treated danger as his mistress. On his last mission he flew his plane so near the German guns at Guernsey that he arrived back at Dunkeswell with bullet holes in the fuselage as his souvenir.

Joe Jr. usually had letters from his family to help relieve the tedium of waiting for the next flight. But back home everyone expected his imminent arrival in time for his birthday on July 25, and the family had largely stopped writing him. His father had even stopped sending him the candy that was Joe Jr.’s only addiction. On July 19, his father decided that maybe Joe Jr. wouldn’t be home so soon, and he wrote another letter. The major news was that Jack was in the hospital. “He seems to be getting along better, although he has had his ups and downs,” Joe wrote. “Rumor hath it that you are very much in love, but we have not had any of the details…. Anyway, let us hope you are on your way and we shall see you very soon.”

Joe Jr. knew that he would not be returning a hero, not in the exalted way he defined the word. He had lost that sprightly step that he felt would lead him to the highest reaches of political office, and yet his father expected so much of him. “I think at this point you are about the only one of us many that has the good graces of the head of the family but I give you about 4 days after your arrival in this country before you’ll join the rest of us,” Bobby wrote his brother, warning Joe Jr. of what would face him in America.

Joe Jr. was already packing up his gear when he was called into the squadron office and told about an extraordinary secret mission code-named “Anvil.” The allies faced a terrible danger, the Nazis’ newest weapon, the V-l rocket. Since the week after D-Day the V-ls had been slamming into London by the hundreds, wreaking death and destruction and, worse yet, generating a new kind of fear. In France the Nazis bunkered their rocket bases in defenses that so far had proved impregnable to allied bombs. Out in a hangar sat a specially fitted PB4Y bomber that the navy hoped would end all that. This plane that had just been flown over from Philadelphia would be filled with explosives. The pilot would fly the craft up to two thousand feet and then switch the piloting over to one of the two mother ships trailing behind. Then he and his co-pilot would parachute out, while the deadly cargo flew on, to be guided directly toward one of the Nazi V-l bases.

Joe Jr. volunteered immediately for the assignment, without a moment’s reflection and with boyish enthusiasm. In raising his hand high, he was making the kind of choice envisioned by the men of Harvard half a century before. Life was a journey of character through time. A man was true and strong and brave, and one day, if life was as it was supposed to be, he would have a chance to test those virtues on a great and bloody field of combat, and what was important was not whether he lived or died, but that he proved true.

Joe Jr. had finally found the mission that