Yacht Gossip in the Bahamas: The 1943 Version Is Pretty Juicy

Wenner-Gren’s ‘Southern Cross’ And Her Role in Wartime Intrigue

Peter Swanson Aug 23

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CAMERA 1, OPENER: Three well dressed men converse in the sumptuous saloon of a 320-foot yacht moored in the Bahamas. Their names are George Soros, Elon Musk and Prince Harry. England and the United States are allies in a war. It’s a Netflix remake, and Russia is the enemy du jour.

Soros is suspected of working for Moscow, the Prince is a Russian sympathiser and likely traitor, and Musk is, of course, the richest guy on the boat.

The climactic scene happens at the end of Episode 7, when Musk is assassinated in brutal fashion, a crime that is investigated in subsequent episodes but never solved. Critics are unkind. “Lurid, cartoonish, farfetched. Why is Soros always the bad guy?” they write.

Yet this very scenario—the black-and-white version, you might say—was playing out in the Bahamas in 1942-43.

As war broke out in Europe, Swedish industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren sailed to Bahamian waters aboard Southern Cross, the fifth or sixth largest private motoryacht in the world. Wenner-Gren’s tenure in the Bahamas mixed business and pleasure; among his offshore properties was Paradise Island in Nassau, the site of today’s Atlantis mega-resort and marina.

And while you might think that the Bahamas were the farthest place in the world from the mayhem of war, during 1942 and 1943 a critical phase of the Battle of the Atlantic was raging all around the islands.

Predatory U-boats were lying in wait for the oil tankers from Venezuela and American refineries along the Gulf of Mexico as they tried to make their way north along the Gulf Stream. German successes were staggering.

 In June-July 1942 alone, 30 ships were sunk along the southern edge of Bahamian waters. By November U-boats had sunk 263 ships in the Caribbean Sea. Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill was apoplectic; he wrote President Roosevelt begging for more aggressive action by the U.S. Navy, which had been uncharacteristically lethargic.

England needed oil and other strategic goods to survive. She needed food. German U-Boat successes were dangerously close to forcing London to capitulate.

Allied intelligence agencies mistrusted Axel Wenner-Gren intensely. The Swede made his fortune as founder of the Electrolux vacuum cleaner company, but he was also a major owner of Bofors, the Swedish armaments manufacturer that had covertly assisted in Germany’s re-armament under the Nazi regime.

Wenner-Gren openly boasted about his friendly connections to Hitler’s inner circle, and his crew was formerly of the Swedish Navy, a pro-Nazi institution within neutral Sweden. Southern Cross itself had immense fuel capacity and bristled with antennas connected to its state-of-the-art radio room.

(Wenner-Gren had purchased Southern Cross from American tycoon Howard Hughes for $1 million. “The Aviator” had been courting Hollywood in the 1930s and used the palatial vessel as his personal offshore drilling platform, you might say.)

Events of September 1939 fueled Allied suspicions toward the Swede. They happened while Southern Cross was on a pleasure cruise in the North Atlantic. In the first sinking of the submarine war, U-30 torpedoed the liner Athenia with 1,450 Canadian and American passengers on board.

Southern Cross happened to be nearby. She rescued 200 survivors and delivered them to Ireland. Allied intelligence considered her proximity highly suspicious and saw causality in what was proffered as coincidence. Allied intelligence suspected that even if Wenner-Gren hadn’t come to the Bahamas in 1942 on a secret mission to refuel German submarines, Southern Cross may have been serving as a scout ship, helping U-boats find targets such as Athenia.

Despite official paranoia, Wenner-Gren was able to take up residence in the Bahamas. He became friendly with the Duke of Windsor, who had come to Nassau to serve as wartime governor of the Bahamas, then a British possession. The Duke was formerly known as Edward VIII, King of England.

 In a spectacular 1936 news event, he had abdicated the throne of England to marry the “woman I love,” an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson. The abdication twosome were frequent guests aboard Southern Cross, and Wenner-Gren once loaned the use of his yacht to run Wallis over to Florida to have a tooth pulled.

Before the war, the Duke and his wife had met Hitler and expressed their admiration for the Nazi regime. It is widely suspected that the Duke later engaged in treasonous wartime communications with the Nazis, any evidence of which will remain under the seal of British government secrecy until 2046. He was believed to be Hitler’s first choice as puppet ruler of Britain after the planned German invasion. Churchill, in effect, had exiled the Duke to Nassau to get this troublesome royal out of the way.

Another friend of Wenner-Gren was Sir Harry Oakes, slain in one of the 20th century’s great unsolved mysteries. Harry Oakes could be compared to the Elon Musk of his day; certainly he was one of wealthiest men in the British empire. A native of Maine’s Downeast region, Oakes amassed an enormous fortune by discovering gold in Canada, became a Canadian citizen and eventually landed in Nassau, a tax haven, where he was knighted for his good works in the community.

While on a cruise to Mexico, the allies blacklisted Wenner-Gren, forcing the Swede to remain there with his famous yacht. Now communicating at longer range, the Duke and Oakes are suspected of having made a series of investments brokered by their buddy Wenner-Gren—illegally. These deals would have been in contravention of wartime monetary regulations and, given Wenner-Gren’s involvement, possibly designed to expand Nazi influence in Latin America.

When Sir Harry Oakes’ body was found bludgeoned, bloody and burned in July 1943, the Duke of Windsor did something very odd. Instead of summoning Scotland Yard, he forbade anyone but two mediocre, hand-picked Miami police detectives from investigating the case. These detectives arrested Oakes’ son-in-law, a dashing French marquis, on evidence so flimsy as to be nearly invisible.

Why not Scotland Yard? Conventional wisdom is that a competent investigation might have uncovered Oakes’ and the Duke’s illicit dealings with Wenner-Gren, which would have infuriated Winston Churchill.

Alfred de Marigny was quickly acquitted of the gruesome slaying. Despite the favorable verdict, he was ordered to leave the Bahamas, but as consolation he was given the rope they would have used to hang him. It was a special type of rope, you see, imported from Britain.

He and wife Nancy went to stay for a short period at the home of his friend Ernest Hemingway, just outside of Havana, Cuba, at a time when the novelist happened to be working as a freelance agent for U.S. Naval Intelligence at the Havana embassy.

Who killed Harry Oakes? Books have been written on the subject, pointing the finger at the American Mafia, which wanted to develop casinos in Nassau, or Allied intelligence services, or a combination of both. Another scenario blames the scion of a prominent (to this day) Bahamian real estate brokerage.

Secret documents surrounding the relationship between the Duke of Windsor and the Nazis may hold some answers, but secrecy fuels speculation and the Internet spreads it. Some have even speculated that Wenner-Gren himself may have been involved in the killing, though that would seem out-of-character for the affable industrialist.

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Wenner-Gren remained in Mexico for the duration of the war, donating Southern Cross to the Mexican Navy for use as a training vessel. One account has the ship being scrapped in 1960. His business dealings in Latin America accrued even more wealth for Wenner-Gren, not the least of which was founding what became Mexico’s telephone monopoly.

After the war, Wenner-Gren returned to the Bahamas and, among other things, bought up property on the island of Andros. Friends and surrogates minimized the Swede’s connection to the Nazis, saying Wenner-Gren himself had exaggerated his relationship with men such as Air Marshall Herman Goering. In that, Wenner-Gren joined the legion of powerful people then trying to distance themselves from the Nazis, who not only were defeated but had been outed as genocidal criminals.

Wenner-Gren died in 1961, and, aside from unproven wartime suspicions, is remembered through the foundations that bear his name. One of the Swedish magnate’s good works, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, continues to be a prominent supporter of worldwide research in “all branches of anthropology.”

His company ALWEG built the original Disney World monorail.

 After the Bahamas, the Duke of Windsor was never given another official role. He and Wallis quietly lived out their lives unloved by anyone but each other.

JFK and Wenner-Gren’s Mistress

Just when you thought the story could not get any juicer, comes a precious footnote to the Wenner-Gren story. Wenner-Gren and John Fitzgerald Kennedy shared a girlfriend, and his presidency might be an unintended consequence of the affair.

She was a Danish beauty named Inga Arvard. As young woman, she moved in Nazi circles, attending Goering’s wedding, twice lunching with the Fuhrer, and even accompanying him to the Berlin Olympic Games. Her second husband had been employed by Wenner-Gren, which reportedly led to her to Wenner-Gren’s bed.

“Inga Binga,” as young JFK called her, began sleeping with him around the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while Kennedy was serving as an ensign in the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington. Soon the affair between the 24-year-old naval officer and the married Nazi sympathizer came to the attention of Kennedy’s superiors and the FBI.

FBI agents followed the couple, bugged their hotel rooms and telephones. The idea that a suspected German Mata Hari was carrying on with an intelligence officer and son of a former U.S. ambassador, no less, did not sit well with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph Kennedy himself.

To preserve his political future, randy Jack was forced to end the affair. His dad ensured there were no immediate consequences, but Kennedy was reassigned and eventually sent to the Pacific to command PT-109, not a yacht, but nevertheless one of the most important vessels in the American imagination. Kennedy’s war record helped the senator from Massachusetts carve out a narrow victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election.

Other Supplementary Reading

“Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes?” by James Leasor, House of Stratus, 1983.

“The Secret History of the FBI,” by Ronald Kessler, St. Martins, 2002.

“Operation Drumbeat: The Dramatic True Story of Germany’s First U-Boat Attacks Along the American Coast in World War II,” by Michael Gannon, Harper and Row, 1992.

This story was first published on May 13, 2022.