2. The Young Hawks
On January 20, 1961, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. became President of the United States of America. He made no secret of his dislike of the German Reich; it seemed fitting, then, that one of the most vocal of the new generation of Reich leadership was the Fuehrer's new ambassador to the United States, Rudolf von Ribbentrop. English-educated, von Ribbentrop had served in Russia, Italy, France, and England as a Waffen-SS officer and had in fact won the Knight's Cross in Russia, with Oak Leaves in Italy and Swords in England, before serving as a local liaison in England and in a variety of English-speaking foreign service roles before his assignment to the United States.
Figure 146: Typical of Kennedy Presidency treatment of Reich officials, Ambassador von Ribbentrop was cropped from the right edge of the official Inauguration photograph.
Von Ribbentrop arrived a few weeks before Kennedy's inauguration, and made a stir by rendering the Party salute at the inaugural rendition of the American national anthem. Kennedy apparently found this gesture deeply offensive, despite it being fully in keeping with Reich diplomatic protocol. This was merely the beginning of the ongoing confrontation between President and Ambassador. It is ironic that President Kennedy put such great effort into a public show of diplomatic cooperation with the Reich early in 1961, appointing the aviator Lindbergh as ambassador to Berlin and sending his own father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., as a special plenipotentiary envoy regarding arms limitation. President Kennedy himself made his position very clear in a famous exchange with his father in December of 1960, unwittingly captured by recording devices in the White House, the American Presidential residence:
KENNEDY SR: Son, this business of antagonizing the Germans is just going to backfire. They beat Stalin, they beat the Frenchies, they beat the Brits, and then they said stop. They've stayed on their side of the Atlantic, why do you want to poke them?
KENNEDY JR: Dad, if you want to shake Hitler's hand so badly, go to Berlin with Charlie Lindbergh. He'll just smile, shake your hands, and while he's talking to you, he'll send that bastard Skorzeny to kill our boys in Cuba or something.
President Kennedy's use of his own father as a diplomat was typical of the incestuous, nepotistic Kennedy presidency. He famously called his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, into the Oval Office just after the inauguration, informing him bluntly that the reason that Johnson had been his running mate had been to open up the Senate Majority Leader's position to his younger brother John. He expected Johnson to "sit down, shut up, and say 'yes sir' when told*." As John Kennedy became the Senate Majority Leader, Robert Kennedy became the United States' equivalent of a Minister of Justice, the Attorney General. The youngest Kennedy brother, Edward, was the only one deemed too junior to occupy an official place in the constellation surrounding the new president. As a result, Edward Kennedy became Joseph Kennedy's unofficial envoy, a role similar to that which Harry Hopkins once played for Franklin Roosevelt.
Figure 147: President Kennedy's 1961 Cabinet, notable for its militancy and anti-German bias
Kennedy's cabinet choices reflected his anti-German bias. The brothers John and Allen Dulles, shadowy godfathers of the American intelligence service, retained their prominence under Kennedy, with John Dulles as Secretary of State and Allen Dulles as the Kennedy spymaster. Both Dulles brothers had served in a variety of covert roles since the Willkie Administration; Allen Dulles had been the architect of the operation resulting in the trial and execution of Captain Francis Gary Powers on charges of espionage and the assassination (on Hauptsturmfuehrer Heydrich's orders) of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover the year prior. To this day, it is a mystery how Dulles survived the debacle with his career intact. The most common theory is that Kennedy admired Dulles as a man who attempted to resist the Reich by any means, even if it meant American deaths.
Equally mysterious was the rise of two of General Gavin's proteges, Maxwell Taylor and Matthew Ridgway, to command of the United States Army. Each had commanded a parachute division in the late 1940s, though the divisions they commanded were longtime rivals. Taylor had served as the commandant of the American military academy at West Point, but the Kennedy Hearings had brought him dangerously close to the center of power as General Gavin fell. Only his reputation for absolute integrity, in the Marshall mold, had saved him where it could not save more famous names. Ridgway, slightly older than Taylor, had served as the Eisenhower Administration's military expert on the growing situation in South America; as such, he had become much closer to Kennedy than Eisenhower, and came out of General MacArthur's shadow when Kennedy requested that notable's final retirement in 1961.
The new Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Burke, was an aggressive admiral with a fine record facing the Reichsmarine off the coast of Africa, and had been one of the prime movers behind the Rickover Committee in the 1950s. It was hardly surprising, given Kennedy's claim to want new blood in the United States' upper levels of leadership, that he rose to the top. Burke almost immediately became embroiled in a dispute with General LeMay of the United States Air Force over control of the potential nuclear arsenal of the United States; this internal battle was one of several going on over the direction the United States military should take. LeMay claimed, based on observation of the Luftwaffe, that strategic airpower could be a decisive battlefield weapon, and that the day of large land forces had ended with the first atomic detonations. Both Army and Navy disagreed, with Burke protesting that trusting the entire nuclear arsenal to one branch was foolish, and the Army leaders pointing to the developing situation in South America as proof that land warfare was not yet outdated. LeMay's outspoken personality appealed to Kennedy, though, and his appointment was one more clue that Kennedy wished to continue the American atomic program, halted and restarted a dozen times since Roosevelt.
American diplomacy during this period had a certain schizophrenic quality to it as well. In addition to the appointment of Lindbergh as ambassador to Germany and the dispatch of Joseph Kennedy Sr. as a special arms-control envoy, Kennedy dispatched former general James Gavin as ambassador to France, a post Gavin reluctantly accepted, as it game him a closer vantage point from which to watch continuing developments within the Reich. The difficulty was that Gavin was not particularly loyal to the Kennedy regime, though Kennedy freely admitted that perhaps purging Gavin in the 1950s had not been the wisest decision he had taken.
Much of the electronic traffic surrounding the early Kennedy administration was intercepted by Reich observers. The Buro Zuse had completed work on a new generation of radar and radio observation technology, combining the Reich's nascent sattelite network with receivers ringed around the Atlantic. Zuse himself was dismissive of these machines' capabilities, preferring to focus his work on continuing to refine his computing devices. He was aided in this by the March 1961 addition of General Dornberger to the Economic Cabinet and the associated Fuehrer Directive, which made Dornberger and von Braun's department the single most important agency in the Reich. Needless to say, this caused considerable friction between Dornberger and his military superiors; however, Dornberger was largely innocent of the accusations of careerism lodged against him.
Figure 148: Peenemunde Mission Control, 1961
The push for space was to some extent proof of an old English adage, "a rising tide lifts all boats." The immediate benefits of the space program were felt by the Reich's intelligence and research agencies as Zuse developed a new generation of transistor-based computers. An additional side effect of the new emphasis on rocketry was the advancement of Reich aeronautical science and high-altitude research, culminating in the "Fernstrahlbomber" project, a successor to the earlier Uralbomber project of the 1930s. Fernstrahlbomber was meant to reach North America without refueling from stations on German soil, which current bombers could not yet do; bases in Iceland, the Azores, and Diego Garcia were considered to be far too vulnerable to interdiction and capture by American forces to justify placing large bomber forces at those outposts. Finally, even the Army benefited from the space push; rocket-propelled anti-tank weapons became the norm, phasing out artillery-based tank destroyers.
All of this was, of course, somewhat in the future; at the time, it was doubtless difficult for the generals to understand the shift from focusing on conventional forces to this mania for rockets. Many of the general staff, indeed, quietly submitted that the Fuehrer had finally lost his mind. Such muttering had been ongoing since the 1930s, but in his seventies now, the Fuehrer had reached a stage where he could smile indulgently rather than scream and demand a general's resignation.
The upshot of all of this was the combined cabinet shake-up of October 1961; Generaloberst Dornberger co-opted the role of the Economics Minister insofar as the German economy was centered around the space program and the research being conducted at Stralsund. At the same time, Field Marshal Busch, who had been the Chief of the General Staff since the late 1940s, retired from that position. His replacement was SS General Skorzeny, appointed on the Fuehrer's directive in one of the last instances of the Hitler's direct intervention in the military. It seemed to many that the Waffen-SS had finally succeeded in trumping the Reichsheer, with Hausser still Minister of War and Skorzeny as the Chief of Staff. If Reichsfuehrer-SS Himmler showed any signs of triumph, it was short-lived. His control over his own organization had been steadily unravelling for twenty years, and for many years he had lived in a state of splendid isolation on the Indian frontier as the Reich's spymaster in the Subcontinent. He chose this moment to return to Berlin, to the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse headquarters of the SS, to attempt one last time to regain control of the Schutzstaffel.
It would be the climactic showdown between Heydrich and Himmler for control of the black corps.
* There is evidence that Johnson was working as a German agent during this period. See Caro,
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4. - Fredlund
). Unfortunately, as with a 1960s Joe Kennedy Jr., there are no photographs extant of the H44-series battleships, as they existed mostly in the imaginations of some designers in Kiel. The Vanguard was the most modern battleship ever built (as opposed to refitted like the Iowa), so you pay your money and you take your chances.
