Sabotage: Mission to Destroy Hitler's Atomic Bomb
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15
Ratings1
Average rating5
A stunning adventure involving Nazis, nukes, fighting, failure, and everyday heroes, from the author of the award-winning The Nazi Hunters. Neal Bascomb delivers another nail-biting work of nonfiction for young adults in this incredible true story of spies and survival.The invasion begins at night, with German cruisers slipping into harbor, and soon the Nazis occupy all of Norway. They station soldiers throughout the country. They institute martial rule. And at Vemork, an industrial fortress high above a dizzying gorge, they gain access to an essential ingredient for the weapon that could end World War II: Hitler's very own nuclear bomb. When the Allies discover the plans for the bomb, they agree Vemork must be destroyed. But after a British operation fails to stop the Nazis' deadly designs, the task falls to a band of young Norwegian commandos. Armed with little more than skis, explosives, and great courage, they will survive months in the snowy wilderness, elude a huge manhunt, and execute two dangerous missions. The result? The greatest act of sabotage in all of World War II.
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I came to read Bascomb's Sabotage: Mission to Destroy Hitler's Atomic Bomb as a gift from my five-year-old daughter. She and my wife were at the local library book sale, and she picked it up “for daddy.” How, then, was I not to read it?
I was intrigued after reading the jacket cover, and I'll admit to being very surprised by the text itself. I rolled through this book in less than a week (which was a busy work week at that, with a lot of travel). Bascomb's prose was engaging, and it kept the pace of the book intact, even when the Operation Grouse members were simply waiting through the Vidda winters.
For context, I knew nothing of this operation, nor more than a passing notion that if the U.S. and its allies were pursuing atomic weaponry, so too must have been their enemies. The book balances enough detail in the process of producing heavy water and how that related to the Nazi's efforts to build a uranium reactor and, consequently, an atomic bomb to aid in my understanding of why the Vemork plant was so important with the need to tell a story. Sabotage is, after all, a human story.
I enjoyed the maps (to visualize the setting) as well as the photographs (to connect me to the central characters). I also appreciated the brief introduction to Norwegian pronunciations at the start of the text. As such, I found myself trying to pronounce the terms correctly, and that helped me to remember person and place names, which enabled a recall of those people and places while reading along. Otherwise, I would have glossed over those names and been somewhat lost as to how they all connected as the story developed.
Though I enjoy history, I find that I engage with it better via television than through the written word. Sabotage is a notable exception to my rule and well worth the read.
