Readers Fill in the Story Surrounding Death of Lt. Joseph Kennedy

Answer Man's Sept. 6 column about the death of Lt. Joseph Kennedy -- killed while on a mission over England during World War II -- brought many comments from readers. Kennedy's bomber -- packed with explosives and rigged to be operated remotely by radio control from a nearby plane -- exploded before the Navy pilot could bail out.

The targets for these Project Aphrodite missions included a Nazi "supergun" site on the coast of France and the launching pads for V1 and V2 rockets. Answer Man's characterization of the latter as "primitive" missiles rankled a few readers. True enough. The rockets were simple compared with the guided missiles that came later, but Londoners on the receiving end of a V2 wouldn't have found it at all primitive.

And it wasn't only from the French coast that the Nazis launched their missiles. Arlington's Dirk van der Sluijs grew up in the Netherlands and was a teenager during World War II. Wrote Dirk: "We lived in the far southwestern part of the Hague, in a street about one mile from the North Sea coast (facing the U.K.), and less than half a mile behind the evacuated strip along the coast line, heavily mined by the occupying German army. Those V1 and V2 rockets (particularly the latter) were launched from a site right behind my parental home, two streets east of us. It must have been in 1944, maybe as early as late 1943, and in those early stages when they were still experimenting with those missiles, in bed at night we would listen to them being launched and wonder: Is this one going to 'make it' or will it crash somewhere in the neighborhood? Failure happened not infrequently, with obvious destruction and loss of life in our immediate surroundings."

Jim Wise of Alexandria is a retired Navy captain whose book, "The Navy Cross," includes a chapter on Joe Kennedy. He notes that both U.S. and British investigators cited a number of factors that might have caused the explosion. Among them: radio static, a jamming signal, excessive vibration, overheating in the electrical circuitry of the arming panel and an enemy radio signal. Wrote Jim: "One plausible conjecture was that the most powerful jamming station in England went on the air just before the explosion, causing its pulses to affect the remote-control system or the arming mechanism in the aircraft."

The column struck a chord with Arlington's Jim Garvin. His father, Noel Garvin, was a Project Aphrodite pilot. Answer Man reached Noel in Clemson, S.C., where the 89-year-old retired textile engineer lives.

In 1944, Noel was a B-17 pilot who had flown 16 or 17 missions. His commanding officer asked for volunteers, explaining that piloting a bomb-laden plane and bailing out after it was controlled remotely would count for five missions. Noel considered this a good deal, since it would put him closer to 25 missions, a pilot's ticket home. The training was to take three or four weeks, but during that time Kennedy's plane blew up. Training stretched to four months.

The day finally came and, at around 7,000 feet, Noel and his crewman threw themselves from the B-17. Said Noel: "When you pulled the fuse on that thing, there wasn't any going back. There wasn't but one way out."

Noel pulled his rip cord and watched the ground come up to meet him. "I landed in a beet field. . . . There was a big sugar beet there, and I reached over and kissed it. I tell my wife: No offense, that was the best sugar I ever had."

Your column answering the question about Joe Kennedy was excellent. This brings to mind a question which has been on my mind: Under what authority was Senator Ted Kennedy allowed to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery?

-- Mark Ridenour, Dayton, Md.

Arlington has detailed regulations stipulating who can be buried there. If you're an active-duty member of the armed forces and you die, you can be buried there. If you have ever been president of the United States, you may be buried there. The same thing goes if you held an elective office in the U.S. government and served on active duty with the armed forces.

That last one applied to Ted Kennedy. He served in the U.S. Army for two years. Kennedy was posted to NATO headquarters in Paris and was discharged in 1953 with the rank of private first class.

Sign of the Times (Table)

Several readers pointed out that Answer Man's reference to a "100-mile-square capital" in last week's column should have been a "100-square-mile capital."

Send your questions to answerman@washpost.com.