Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (25 page)

But for those, like Billy, who had participated in the ill-fated Battle of Flanders, the entry into Belgium represented something at once larger and more personal. When Billy had returned to London four years before, he had confided his anguish to his cousin Jean. In bitter tones, he had spoken of his sense of guilt at having survived when so many others—not just fellow soldiers, but also innocent men, women, and children—had perished. Billy had often in the intervening years found himself living much more vividly and intensely in the war zone than in Britain, where he was in body, but not always in mind. At times during those years it had been as if he were living simply for the moment when he would go back and finish the fight and avenge all of those lives he had been powerless to save in 1940. That moment had come at last.

On September 4, the day after the liberation of Brussels, Billy wrote a long, lovely letter to Kick, who was then celebrating Labor Day with Jack and his naval buddies. She would not receive the letter until sometime later. Speaking of the euphoria of the past several days, Billy reversed—no doubt unconsciously—his despairing, long-ago statement to his cousin Jean on that terrible day after the fall of France, in 1940: “We ran and we ran!” Now, manifestly at peace in a way that he simply had not been in years, Billy wrote to Kick of the triumphs of the past six days: “We have advanced and advanced and advanced…”

He wrote of his sense of what a wretched time the Belgians had had under Nazi rule, and of their great loathing for their now vanquished German oppressors. He wrote of the tears of happiness and of the embraces with which he and the other British liberators had been greeted. He spoke of his never having suspected that the human race could be capable of such an outpouring of emotion, and of his sense of being somehow unworthy of all that gratitude, “living as I have in reasonable safety and comfort during these years while they have been suffering such terrible hardships under the Germans.” He told his young wife of his belief, based on the German soldiers he had encountered of late, that the Nazis were quite “exhausted and demoralized” and were unlikely to be able to “go on much longer.”

Billy did not have a chance to bask in the glory of the liberation of Brussels for long. The day after he wrote to Kick, Colonel Roddy Hill ordered the 5th Coldstream to resume its advance. He directed the battalion to head northward to the villages of Beverloo and Heppen, and then on to Bourg Leopold. On September 8, the British suffered heavy casualties as they fought in torrential rain to capture Beverloo, which had functioned during the German occupation as a training camp for the maniacal 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. Billy had emerged by this time as an inspiring leader, standing atop a tank and directing the fire against German armor, with what appeared to be no concern whatever for his own safety. In the course of the attack, his sense of calm was on magnificent display. Though under constant fire from the enemy, he was observed at one point walking to one of his sections “as calmly as if he had been in the garden at Compton Place.”

After the fall of Beverloo, where approximately one hundred SS troops and recruits were taken captive, the British moved on, with the objective of clearing Heppen of the Germans. Despite the perception in Billy’s September 4 letter to Kick that the Germans were drained and demoralized, the SS fought furiously. As the day waned, Billy ruefully reflected that a quarter of his company had perished. He was the last officer alive and unwounded. The heavy losses sent a chill through the remaining men, who faced having to resume the assault against Heppen the next day.

By sunrise on September 9, the downpour had stopped. The sky had brightened considerably. But overnight, the German forces in Heppen had been reinforced by large numbers of troops brought over from Bourg Leopold.

Confronted with the need to rally and inspire the men of his company anew, Billy took a page from the technique of Colonel Roddy Hill, to whom he had handed over leadership of the 5th Coldstream at the close of Operation Bluecoat. At a moment when morale was low, Hill’s incongruously impeccable attire and pointedly imperturbable manner conveyed to the troops that in spite of the hell they had just been through, everything was going to be “quite all right.” On the morning of the ninth, Billy appeared before his men in a white mackintosh, though it was no longer raining. As an officer, he was not required to adhere to strict battle dress, so the white mac was a clear and emphatic sign of his status. That his costume, which also included pale corduroy trousers and a beret, threatened to mark him off as a target for German snipers was precisely the point. Thusly clad, Billy projected a sense of calm indifference. On the one hand, it was as if he were impervious to the dangers that lay ahead. On the other, it was almost as if he were trying to draw fire on himself and thereby to shield his men. Since his arrival in Normandy, Billy had seen fellow officers picked off all around him, so on the present occasion he had to know that the white mac placed him in mortal danger.

At a quarter to nine, the attack on Heppen began. No. 2 and 3 companies of the 5th Coldstream received orders to go, one to the left, the other to the right. They were to clear either side of the village of Germans, then join up afterward. Within about thirty minutes’ time, No. 2 Company had reached its objective. But No. 3 Company, led by Major the Marquess of Hartington, had not been so lucky. Part of his company was pinned down by the concentrated fire of some fifteen machine guns wielded by members of the elite Hermann Göring Parachute Division.

As the German guns roared, Billy seemed to have made a decision. Telling the others to stay behind, he went on ahead to reconnoiter, accompanied only by his batman. Twenty-five-year-old Corporal Bill Garnham, who viewed the scene from a protected position behind one of the village dwellings, witnessed Billy’s final moments. Conspicuous in his white mac and pale corduroys, Billy, standing out in the open, was ignoring the machine gun fire and urging the platoons on when he received a fatal shot to the head.

Garnham judged that he and two other soldiers who were with him behind the house were the only Guardsmen at the moment not to have been pinned down by the gunfire. He decided, therefore, that it was up to him to avenge the death of Lord Hartington. The trio entered the house and ascended to the top floor. From their perch, they spotted a German helmet, accompanied by a sniping rifle, some fifty yards in the distance. Garnham took a shot at the sniper, who disappeared for an instant, then suddenly popped back up like a jack-in-the-box. The frustrated Guardsman again targeted the sniper with his rifle. Again the helmet briefly dropped out of sight, then popped back into view. Garnham changed over to a Bren light machine gun, but to his distress the result of his third attempt to kill the sniper appeared to be the same. This went on for about an hour, at the close of which Garnham despaired that he must be “the world’s worst shot.” Only later, when the British at last overtook the German position, did Garnham discover his mistake. Far from having repeatedly missed his target, he had in fact slaughtered as many as forty-five Germans: Hardly would Garnham kill one Nazi when another would pop up to replace him.

Meanwhile, as the only platoon commander had been wounded, it devolved to Company Sergeant Major Jim Cowley to lead the company on, as the British soldiers systematically cleared the houses and their environs of Germans. Before moving on to Nijmegen, where they were due to support the 82nd U.S. Airborne Division, the battalion buried Major the Marquess of Hartington, along with several other Guardsmen who fell that day, beside a tiny chapel in Heppen.

Looking back on the fight that had cost Billy his life, Major General Sir Allan Adair, commander of the Guards Armored Division, would call the capture of Heppen “the key to the whole subsequent operations.” Had the men who fought and in some cases died at Heppen not succeeded in extending the bridgehead to the west, “any subsequent advances would have been extremely difficult.”

A telegram addressed to the Marchioness of Hartington arrived at Compton Place on the thirteenth. At that point, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire had not heard from Billy in almost three weeks. In Kick’s absence, they read the telegram notifying the widow of Major the Marquess of Hartington’s death. There were as yet no details, but at length the duke was able to learn that his son had been killed in the fighting after his battalion went through Brussels.

There was no mention of the eyewitness account of Billy’s having been shot through the head. The story related to the duke and duchess was that a bullet had pierced their son through the heart. His anguished mother declared it a great weight off her mind that he had at least died instantly and had not had to suffer. Moucher Devonshire wasted no time sharing the news with Kick. She drafted an emotional letter to her daughter-in-law, informing Kick of what had happened and assuring her that she would always be cherished by her late husband’s family.

“I want you never, never to forget what complete happiness you gave him,” the duchess wrote to Kick. “All your life you must think that you brought complete happiness to one person. He wrote that to me when he went to the front. I want you to know this for I know what great conscientious struggles you went through before you married Billy, but I know that it will be a source of infinite consolation to you now that you decided as you did. All your life I shall love you—not only for yourself but that you gave such perfect happiness to my son whom I loved above anything in the world.” The duke and duchess also sent off a cable to Kick about what had happened to Billy, but for some reason it failed to reach her.

Three days later, Kick was in New York shopping for clothes for herself and for gifts to take back with her to England at the end of the month. She was in the Bonwit Teller department store when her sister Eunice suddenly materialized, bidding her to come at once to their father’s suite at the Waldorf Towers. When she arrived there, the father whose assistance she had so often sought in her dogged efforts to get back to Billy and later to find some way to marry him told her that her young husband was dead. He had gotten the news at the Waldorf, before any of the messages from the duke and duchess reached Kick. For a full week, she had gone on with her life unaware that her husband had fallen.

Kick’s immediate reaction, she would later say, was to feel “numb.” That evening she accompanied her family to dinner at the restaurant Le Pavillon where in typical Kennedy fashion, Billy was barely if at all mentioned. As they had done following the death of their eldest brother, Eunice and the others carried on cheerfully as though the tragedy had not really occurred.

Rose Kennedy promptly threw herself into prayers and Masses for her daughter’s late husband. To Kick’s mounting distress, however, there was an undertone in her mother’s actions and attitude, as if Rose felt that Billy’s death was punishment for the apostasy of their marriage, and even that his demise provided a chance for his widow to get right with the Catholic Church again. Rose was very soon urging Kick that the time had come “to dry our tears,” though Rose’s tears had yet to flow in the first place.

Kick’s father also seemed to have perceived an opportunity in the tragedy. Joe Kennedy pointed out, as Kick later paraphrased it, that as it was she had had “a lot of problems that might never have been worked out and that perhaps later in life [she] might have been very unhappy.” At least, the old man suggested, this new turn of events may have spared her that future discontent.

Kick initially found herself hoping against hope that the news about Billy might yet prove to have been wrong. So much of her relationship with Billy had taken place in the imagination. They had often been separated by world events and by the actions of their respective families. Through it all Kick had refused to give up on what she wanted, refused to stop pounding, and in the end she had made her way back to England and she and Billy had indeed become husband and wife. Now, in spite of what her father or anyone else told her, she found it hard to believe that she would never see Billy again. Eager to discover that there had indeed been some mistake, she reached out to Richard Wood’s father at the British Embassy in Washington. It fell to Lord Halifax to inform her that the War Office in London had officially confirmed the terrible news. So there it was.

Still, by her own later account, the “realization” of Billy’s death had yet to fully come to her. The great agony she would soon suffer had yet really to begin. On the telephone with Lord Halifax, Kick seemed, as noted in the British ambassador’s diary, “very good and brave.”

Now again, just as Kick had hesitated at the time of the death of her brother about where in light of events she belonged, whether in England or in America, vexing questions of duty and personal identity presented themselves. Initially it seemed as if she might stay with her parents and siblings at Hyannis Port. Before long, however, she had decided to return to England to be with Billy’s mother, father, and sisters.

After days of holding her emotions in check in the prescribed Kennedy manner, did she long to fully pour out her grief in the company of people who would not be put off by tears? Whatever Kick’s motives, Lord Halifax promptly arranged for her to fly back to England on an aircraft carrying Field Marshal Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Air Marshal Charles Portal, chief the British air staff. They had been in Quebec, where, hosted by Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had been meeting to confer about the final phase of the war.

So once again, as she had done a month earlier, Kick packed her things—including Billy’s letter of July 26, 1944—and prepared to fly across the ocean, this time in the opposite direction. Arriving in Quebec City on the nineteenth of September, she was due to stay the night at the Château Frontenac, where the British chiefs of staff also had rooms. The plane, which was to carry but seven passengers including herself, was scheduled to leave early the next morning.