Assault in Norway; Sabotaging the Nazi Nuclear Program

Guilford, CT: Lyons Press [An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield], 2002. First Lyons Press Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing thus. Trade paperback. Very good. xi, [3], 192, [2] pages. Map. Index. Originally published in 1975 and has become a classic work on this topic. This is an insightful account of the successful 1942 commando raid against the strategic-material (heavy water) plant at Vemork designed to destroy supplies and cripple key production facilities. The German program was set back for months. Thomas Gallagher was a widely published journalist and the author of eight books. His novel The Gathering Darkness was nominated for a National Book Award. Mr. Gallagher was born in Manhattan in 1918. After graduating from Columbia College in 1941, he served in Iran during World War II as a civilian attached to the Army Corps of Engineers. He then shipped out as a seaman on freighters with the merchant marine, where he began to write. His well-received first novel, "The Gathering Darkness" (Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), traced the disintegration of a New York family after it lost its fortune in the stock market crash of 1929. Although he continued to write novels, Mr. Gallagher also turned to nonfiction, producing "Fire at Sea" , an investigation of the 1934 fire that destroyed the luxury liner Morro Castle off the New Jersey coast. Mr. Gallagher concluded that rather than being an accident, the fire was set by the ship's sociopathic radio officer. The book won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for nonfiction. Assault in Norway is the classic account of a legendary raid on the Nazi war program. By 1942 Germany had a seemingly insurmountable lead over the Allies in developing an atomic bomb. Contributing to this situation was its access to a crucial ingredient: heavy water, found in great abundance at a fortresslike factory in occupied Norway. Allied hopes of stalling the Nazi nuclear program soon focused on sabotaging the cliffside plant, a suicidal mission. But a team of brave Norwegian exiles, trained in Britain, infiltrated their homeland and, hiding in the wilds, awaited the opportunity to launch one of the war's most daring commando raids. Basing his gripping narrative in large part on interviews with the commandos themselves, Thomas Gallagher recounts in vivid detail the planning and execution of Operation Gunnerside. Assault in Norway recalls the intrigue found in such wartime classics as David Howarth's We Die Alone and The Sledge Patrol, and the mission it recounts inspired the 1965 Hollywood film The Heroes of Telemark. Derived from a Kirkus review: Early in World War II Roosevelt and Churchill became aware that Germany was stockpiling "heavy water" (water with double hydrogen atoms) -- a sure sign that an atomic reactor was being built. Heavy water was used to slow down neutron particle bombardment in a uranium 235 pile. Churchill gave word that the world's only heavy-water plant, at Vemork in Nazi-occupied Norway, must be destroyed. The two commando teams assigned to the raid included several Norwegians, but the airdrop missed its chosen landing spot by ten miles in the dead of winter and an arduous survival odyssey began that eventually required scrapping the original plan and devising a new attack. After terrible setbacks, the hydro plant was crippled. But the Germans managed to get it operational again and a year later a new team attacked the problem of sabotaging the heavy water supplies by sinking a ferry carrying all the water back to Germany. The utter determination of the saboteurs in both raids makes for strong readability and adventure. Gallagher writes with great clarity.