Chamber Divers
2024 • 448 pages • 10h 44m
Ratings1
Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
For readers of classics like The Making of the Atomic Bomb and the more recent histories like Code Girls who want stories about the tech behind military success and the small maverick groups that generate historic innovations
This is a previously classified story of one group of scientific researchers—men and women—who exposed themselves to extraordinary risks to make D-Day a success. On the beaches of Normandy in France two summers before D-Day on June 6 1944, the Allies attempted an all but forgotten invasion. Of the nearly 7000 allied troops sent ashore, only a few hundred survived an unbelievably terrible massacre. The reason for the debacle was a lack of reconnaissance. Was the beach sand firm enough for tanks? How shallow was the offshore water? How soft and steep were the surrounding cliffs? How deadly were the fortifications? The Allies knew they could not afford another disaster like that. The emerging technology of mini-submarines was already being pursued in the Pacific by the Japanese and in the Mediterranean by the Italians. But a small group of extremely eccentric scientists, researching in pressure tanks in the middle of the London Blitz air raids, would devise the critical reconnaissance vessels that would enable the Allies dramatic, history-making success on D-Day. Based on secret documents only recently declassified and hunted down in England by Rachel Lance, this is the story of a band of maverick, hard-drinking submarine researchers, led by the controversial, brilliant biologist and communist sympathizer JBS Haldane and the intrepid, courageous Dr. Helen Spurway. Who fell in love...
Reviews with the most likes.
Reads Almost Like Fiction - And Should Give Soraya M. Lane Inspiration For A Future Novel. First, this is one of the better researched books I've come across in all of my Advance Review Copy reading efforts - over 1100 books since 2018 - at 45% documentation. Kudos to Lance for being so thorough there.
And she needs it - because this is one of the more fantastical nonfiction books you're ever going to come across. A brother and sister experimenting on themselves - as their father, who also experimented on himself *even with chlorine gas*, had trained them to do - gathering a team of like minded scientists to push the limits of the human condition under extreme environments, later in a direct race to help save their country from annihilation.
Before Jacques Cousteau developed SCUBA, there were the scientists working to discover what, exactly, humans could survive under water. What, exactly, happened as the human body was compressed to ever higher pressures? What happened as that pressure was relaxed - either suddenly or gradually? How could we allow humans to survive at ever increasing pressures, and what, exactly, were the limits?
And then... Normandy.
It had already been tried once, and failed miserably - because the soldiers didn't have the data these very scientists were racing to obtain. Could they get it in time for the next invasion attempt?
They could... and they would change the face of warfare (and, to be honest, some entertainment and other scientific pursuits) forever when they did.
This is their story, told for seemingly the very first time.
Very much recommended. And please tag Soraya Lane and beg her to bring this story to actual fiction.
Originally posted at bookanon.com.
