About this item
On August 12, 1944, Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., heir to one of America's most glamorous fortunes, son of the disgraced former ambassador to Great Britain, and big brother to freshly minted PT-109 hero JFK, hoisted himself up into a highly modified B-24 Liberator bomber. The munitions he was carrying that day were fifty percent more powerful than TNT.Kennedy's mission was part of Operation Aphrodite/Project Anvil, a desperate American effort to rescue London from a rain of German V-1 and V-2 missiles. The decision to use these bold but crude precursors to modern-day drones against German V-weapon launch sites came from Air Corps high command. Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle, daring leader of the spectacular 1942 Tokyo Raid, and others concocted a plan to install radio control equipment in "war-weary" bombers, pack them with a dozen tons of high explosives, and fly them by remote control directly into the concrete German launch sites--targets too hard to be destroyed by conventional bombs.
About the Author
I am the author of some 150 books on leadership, management, careers, history, military history, corporate history, career, general business, and other nonfiction. After receiving my Ph.D. in English (specializing in early American literature and culture) from the University of Iowa in 1979, I taught early American literature and culture at Lake Forest College (Lake Forest, Illinois) and at Furman University (Greenville, South Carolina) . I was an editor and scholar with the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum (Winterthur, Delaware) , an institution specializing in the history and material culture of America prior to 1832. I was associate editor at Van Nostrand Reinhold (New York) , senior editor at Abbeville Press (New York) , and vice president of Zenda, Inc. (New York and Nashville) , a consulting firm to museums and cultural institutions. In 1994, I became director of development (senior acquisitions editor) for Turner Publishing, Inc. (Atlanta) , a subsidiary of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., and in 1997, I founded The Ian Samuel Group, Inc., a consulting, creative services, editing, and online content provider in Atlanta.I have been a creative consultant (and on-camera personality) for The Wild West television documentary series (Warner Bros., 1993) , Civil War Journal (A&E Network, 1994) , "The American Experience" series (PBS, 2016) , and The Discovery Channel, and he has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, CNNfn, CNBC, Fox Network affiliates in Philadelphia and Atlanta, and numerous radio news and talk programs, including National Public Radio. He and his work have been featured in BusinessWeek, Fortune, Men's Health, Cosmopolitan, Inc., Atlanta Business Chronicle, and many newspapers, including Atlanta Journal-Constitution and USA Today. Axelrod has served as consultant for the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum (Rochester, New York) , the Airman Memorial Museum (Suitland, Maryland) , and the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum (Winterthur, Delaware) .
