Assault in Norway: Sabotaging the Nazi nuclear bomb [Hardcover]

Thomas Michael Gallagher (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 234 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1st edition (1975)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151095825
• ISBN-13: 978-0151095827
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,975,360 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most exciting war stories I've ever read, February 27, 2010

By 

E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Assault in Norway: Sabotaging the Nazi nuclear bomb (Hardcover)

During World War II, the Allied High Command was determined to prevent the Nazis from developing an atomic bomb. Many of Europe's top-class physicists had fled from fascism, e.g. Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, but others had remained behind. Once the Germans had invaded Norway in 1940, they increased production of heavy water at the Vemork hydroelectric plant, which was the first installation in the world to mass-produce this element. Heavy water (deuterium) was critical for the construction of the world's first fission reactors, and thus critical for the creation of an atom bomb.

All of the attempts to destroy the German heavy water production are discussed in this book, but the emphasis is on Operations Swallow and Gunnerside, the story of the ten Norwegians who pitted their skis and guns against the Nazi juggernaut that held their homeland in thrall.

"Assault in Norway" is both a story of wartime heroism, and a wilderness survival story, for the small band of saboteurs had to spend the winter on Norway's rugged Hardanger Plateau, surviving on the reindeer they skied down and shot (the contents of the reindeers' stomachs was their only source of vitamin C.)

If their survival skills remind you of the Winter Olympics biathlon, it is because this sport has its origins in 19th Century Norway to promote national defense at the local level.

The author creates a vivid picture of wartime Norway with such telling details as wood-burning automobiles, and the anguish of a man who thought he was about to lose his irreplaceable eyeglasses--"the Nazis had seized all of Norway's optical goods and equipment."

This book succeeds on all fronts: it presents a concise summary of the race to produce an atomic bomb; the high-level planning of the secret mission is meticulously researched; above all, the narrative of the saboteurs is absolutely breathtaking, and their humanity toward innocent bystanders, and even toward the enemy was one of the highpoints of the book for me--this is definitely not your typical boom-boom shoot-em-up war story.

There were at least two movies made about the sabotage of the Germans' heavy water production: The Heroes of Telemark(1965), a standard Hollywood war film, and an earlier semi-documentary made in 1948 by a Norwegian/French film crew, called "Kampen om tungtvannet" (alternate title: "Thin Ice"). The neat thing about the latter movie is that some of the saboteurs played themselves. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be available in English, although I'm almost certain parts of it were incorporated in episode 13 ("The Real Heroes of Telemark") of the great BBC documentary Secrets of World War II.