Sabotage: Mission to Destroy Hitler's Atomic Bomb

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.