More on the war effort, and Willow Run's B-24 production:
The American Ambassador to The Court of St. James (Great Britain) was Joseph Kennedy, a noted isolationist who wanted to keep the USA out of the war developing in Europe. It's said that FDR 'awarded' the ambassadorial appointment to Joe Kennedy to get him out of the country, where he couldn't lobby in-person against FDR's plans to support our allies, like the Lend-Lease Program. FDR was prescient-enough to understand Hitler's ambitions, and once he began overrunning eastern Europe, FDR had already been supplying our allies with raw materials, manufactured goods, and armament.
Joe Kennedy had several boys, two were men, actually, Joe Jr. was in the Army, while the middle brother, John, was in the Navy, Ted was not into double digits in age by the start of the war for the USA. Joe was the heir-apparent, being groomed to be a politician after the war, and he knew that the tag of 'war-hero' was a powerful tool for a political aspirant. However he was based stateside, and when his younger brother John accepted an assignment in the Pacific Theater, on a PT boat, Joe feared that John would win a medal and gain fame before he did. Joe finally was able to get sent to the conflict in the European Theater, and he assumed that as a pilot, he would soon see action. A medal and popular acclaim as a war-hero would soon be his! However, he was assigned to flying submarine-search patrols around England, not a way to earn a combat medal for heroism he coveted. He heard of an assignment which was guaranteed to be very-hazardous, but the details were not forthcoming, however, if he wished to volunteer, and was accepted, he would be training every-day for the mission, to begin immediately. Here was his chance, finally, to be in aerial combat, and to earn the medal he desired.
The mission was code-named Project Anvil, and while the target wasn't announced, training began immediately. He found out only what he needed to-know to be able to perform the tasks involved in the project. He would be piloting a B-24 Liberator to a target, but he would-not be piloting the plane back to his point of departure, his airfield base. Joe's job was to fly the plane to the vicinity of the target, then in the air, arm the contents of the plane, turn-on a remote-control autopilot where the plane's flight-path would be controlled by a high-flying plane above him, which would guide the plane to its point of impact, the ground target. Once Joe did his flight duties and armed the plane, he and his accompanying crewman would parachute out of the plane, and the overhead pilot in the other plane would direct the remote-controlled B-24 to its target. Why go to all this trouble? Because the plane would be stuffed-full of a powerful, recently-developed explosive, Torpex, which mixed TNT with aluminum powder to potentiate the blast. Napalm was the initial explosive to be used, but when the Torpex was developed, the decision was made to use it instead. The B-24 was filled with 21,170 pounds of the stuff, which was many-times the explosive in the V-1 ramjet 'buzz-bomb' or the faster than the speed of sound V-2 liquid-propelled rocket developed at the Peenemunde base by a young German rocket engineer by the name of Werner von Braun, 32 years of-age, who had avidly-followed the work of an American scientist who developed the first successful liquid-propelled rockets, Robert H. Goddard. Goddard's work was ignored by the US Army, but he found a champion and a sponsor in one of the heirs to the DuPont fortune, who continued to bankroll Goddard's efforts. The US Army saw no-benefit to the work, but a young scientist/aeronautical engineer in Germany did, and he took Goddard's pioneering work much, much further.
Project Anvil: fill one of the best planes we had with our most-powerful explosive, making it the largest explosive device ever-built, and fly it into one of Hitler's terrible new weapons which was being built to turn England into a smoldering ruin. What was this feared new weapon of Hitler? He already had the V-1 ramjet cruise missile, the supersonic V-2 which would fly into space itself, higher than any plane, before it fell to earth, silent and deadly with its payload of explosives. Since it flew much-faster than the speed of sound, the only time you would know of it was when the explosion happened.
Hitler's armaments experts had developed the next terrible weapon in the V-series, the V-3. This was a tremendous series of cannons of unprecedented length, built into the side of the earth itself. The concept was that as the projectile was fired, as it passed-along its time in the cannon barrel, another propellant charge in the gun would ignite, and this would be repeated several times, until the projectile exited the giant cannon, with a speed and range of the projectile never-before seen. As there were multiple barrels, the multiple cannons would be able to fire repeatedly, the target of such a powerful weapon would surely be obliterated. And, it was built on the east side of the English Channel. England was very-worried, and the Allies came-up with Project Anvil to attempt to destroy this German wonder-weapon, built below-ground and into the land.
Because of the need for the remote pilot of the B-24 to fly the unmanned aircraft into the V-3 site, weather had to be CAVU-weather (ceiling and visibility unlimited), very-hard to come-by in southern England! Joe Kennedy and his flight crewmember drilled, and waited. And waited. Until August 12, 1944.
On that date, the order was to proceed with the first Project Anvil flight. Joe Kennedy and his crewmember entered the loaded-with explosives B-24, and took-off. They were on their way, and prepared to make the in-flight arming of the plane/bomb's fusing. There had been issues with that in the design and drilling/practice stages, it was finally implemented for use, and as Joe Kennedy piloted the B-24, airborne fusing setup work began.
A woman outside her home close-to the English Channel, saw a large plane, flying low, and causing a racket as it was ascending from the airbase not-far-away. Suddenly she was thrown to the ground by a tremendous explosion accompanied by a brilliant flash of light, and as she tried to enter her home, she noticed that the front door was blown-off its hinges. Her niece, who was staying with her, ran upstairs, only to quickly-return, to inform her, "the ceiling has collapsed!" The roof was gone. Other nearby homes also lost their roofs. Windows were shattered up-to nine miles distant. It was the largest explosion in history and would remain-so, until Trinity, in Alamogordo New Mexico, on July 16, 1945.
There was nothing left of the flight crew to bury, there was debris over a one-mile area. Posthumously, Joe received the Navy Cross, he finally had his war-hero's medal.
The investigation was unable to determine exactly what happened, it was thought that in the arming of the aerial bomb fusing mechanism, something went tragically-wrong.
It was one of the strangest missions ever-undertaken by a B-24 crew, they paid the ultimate price, and history changed. The middle Kennedy son went-on to political success, until a sad day November 22, 1963. At that time I was a bit-older than the youngest Kennedy brother, Ted was, when his oldest brother, Joe, died.
The saddest thing is that the V-3 project was abandoned by the Third Reich. It was never made operational, it had a skeleton crew assigned to it, to give the appearance that work was continuing. The deaths of Project Anvil's flight crew were for-nothing.
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