On July twelfth, 1944, a column of muddy Nazi troopers in rural Poland flagged down two vehicles pushed by males carrying German uniforms and requested for a raise. They sat on cylinders within the again, smoking, drying out and cursing the climate. After about half an hour they jumped off, considered one of them quipping to their new pals: “You carry air!”
As Man Walters observes in his shifting and suspenseful guide, it was “a type of moments that historical past would name unbelievable if the paperwork [to prove it] didn’t exist”. The drivers have been members of Poland’s resistance motion in disguise, transporting a cargo that would have meant on the spot loss of life if their passengers had taken a more in-depth look. These cylinders contained the stolen elements of a V-2 rocket, the world’s first long-range ballistic missile and probably the important thing to a Nazi victory.
“My Wunderwaffe [wonder weapon] can have a decisive impact on the struggle,” Adolf Hitler boasted to his generals. “The enemy can have no defence in opposition to it.” Nearly 50ft tall, the V-2 might be blasted to the sting of house earlier than silently descending to Earth at supersonic velocity and killing civilians with exactly zero warning.
Nervous that Hitler was proper, British scientists desperately wished to look at a dwell specimen for potential weaknesses. When intelligence studies got here by {that a} take a look at V-2 had crashed nearly intact right into a distant Polish marsh, they noticed their likelihood. A frantic race ensued, with pilots, partisans and politicians all taking part in essential roles in what generally reads like an old-school struggle comedian.
Walters does a extremely environment friendly job of reconstructing this surprisingly little-known episode from each aspect’s perspective, bolstered by his personal emotional visits to the locations the place it occurred. Properly, he focuses much less on technological particulars and extra on complicated personalities resembling Nazi engineer Wernher von Braun, who later pioneered the US moon landings.
“Science… is sort of a knife,” he protested when requested about his sinister previous. “In the event you give it to a surgeon or a assassin, every will use it otherwise.”
Walters, additionally the creator of a number of second World Battle thrillers, sometimes goes a little bit too far by inventing dialogue or imagining individuals’s thought processes. This reservation apart, Stealing Hitler’s Rocket is a totally partaking story of on a regular basis heroism – and virtually crying out to be filmed.
Andrew Lynch is a contract reviewer
