I watched the Nova episode Hitler’s Supergun on PBS tonight. It was one of the most interesting I’ve seen.
During World War II, Hitler built a huge bunker in France to house superguns that could shoot explosive bullets 80 miles, to London. The allies saw this on surveillance photos and targeted the huge underground bunker with regular bombs but the bombs were not powerful enough. The British then designed and built bunker buster bombs.
But while they were building these bombs, the Americans came up with another idea. They built a drone that could be remotely flown to France where the drone, packed with tons of explosives, would be flown into the bunker and detonated.
But the drone had to take off and get flying in the air by a regular pilot, who would then jump out and parachute to the ground. The pilot who volunteered for this flight was Joseph Kennedy, Jr. Joe was the oldest son of the wealthy Joseph Kennedy Sr., who was grooming Joe to be the next President.
While working with the drone, a junior officer found a flaw with the arming mechanism of the drone. He reported this flaw to his superiors, but they ignored him because they figured that the designers knew what they were doing better than the junior officer. This flaw allowed power to be applied continuously to electric solenoids, which were designed to only be powered intermittently, for a short time. If the power was applied too long, the solenoids could overheat, catch fire and prematurely detonate the explosives.
The junior officer told Joe about this before the mission, and to jump from the plane as quickly as possible. The mission began, and Joe piloted the plane into the sky, but before he could jump, the explosives detonated. No body parts were ever found.
But before the drone mission, the British bunker buster bombs damaged the supergun bunkers so badly they were not usable. Thus the drone mission was not even necessary.
Later, Joe’s younger brother, John F. “Jack” Kennedy became president of the U. S. and the rest is history, when tragedy again struck the Kennedy family.
I found it fascinating that such a strange and tragic set of interlinked events changed world history.
