Blood and Water: Sabotaging Hitler's Bomb - Hardcover

Kurzman, Dan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805032061 ISBN 13: 9780805032062

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 1997

Synopsis

The story of how a desperate clandestine mission in Norway ended the Nazi dream of building the atomic bomb.

About this title

Review:

As the blitzkrieg raged in Europe during World War II, a covert battle was being waged in laboratories as both the Allies and the Nazis raced to create the first atomic bomb. Although the Manhattan Project is now well known, Dan Kurzman chronicles an obscure yet vitally important episode that helped deny the Nazi's the A-bomb.

Soon after the Germans invaded Norway in April of 1940, they began using the Norsk Hydro electrochemical and hydroelectric plant to produce deuterium oxide--"heavy water"--a principal element needed to create atomic weapons. Blood and Water: Sabotaging Hitler's Bomb follows the two-year clandestine mission conducted by the British and Norwegian commandos who braved rugged, high-mountain terrain to defuse a situation that could have changed the course of the war. This is a textbook case of fact being more exciting than fiction; the story has the pace and feel of a well-orchestrated thriller. Based on interviews with the Norwegian and British saboteurs, war diaries, and recently declassified documents, Kurzman's book brings history alive, revealing the real men behind this heroic chapter of the Allies' victory.

From Kirkus Reviews:

In history that reads like a great thriller, award-winning former Washington Post reporter Kurzman (Left to Die: The Tragedy of the USS Juneau, 1994, etc.) tells the story of the Allied effort to derail the Nazi quest to develop a nuclear bomb. In the war's early stages, Kurzman relates, Nazi Germany's atomic research program, which included many of the world's greatest physicists, was more advanced than those of the Allies. However, the German effort was crippled by a dependence on heavy water to facilitate a chain reaction. For a long time Norsk Hydro in Norway, a factory seized by the Germans, was the only producer of heavy water in the Third Reich. At the urging of General Leslie Groves, the military leader of the Manhattan Project, the plant quickly became the target of British commando raids and American bombing attacks. Several of the commando raids failed, and Kurzman's account brings out the heroism of the English and Norwegian raiders who fell victim to Hitler's standing order to execute all captured commandos. In a night attack in February 1943, Norwegian raiders in British uniforms finally succeeded in penetrating the plant and setting off a destructive explosion within the factory. However, because of the danger that the Germans would simply rebuild the productive portions of the plant, American bombers attacked in November 1943 and severely damaged the factory, killing 28 Norwegian civilians. This still did not finish the threat posed by the heavy-water program at Norsk Hydro, however: When the Nazis attempted to move heavy-water stocks from Norway, saboteurs destroyed a ferry bearing the cargo, killing 26 civilians in the process. Kurzman quotes OSS official (and later CIA chief) William Casey as estimating that at war's end the Germans were 700 liters of heavy water short of developing an effective nuclear reaction. Spellbinding and deeply sobering military history. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0805032061
• ISBN 13: 9780805032062
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288