GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 4.16 by 153 litizens.
Genre: Thriller.
Verdict: Good.
In late 1944 the Allied armies in Northern Europe reeled from the German offensive in the Battle of the Bulge. Though much of Belgium had been cleared of Nazis, the Germans remained nearby.
In particular Peenemunde was seventy miles from British lines in Belgium. Hitler had latched onto the rocket program as a wonder weapon that would yet win the war and poured resources into it, despite the doubts of the scientists and the objections of hard-pressed generals. Fictional Willi Graf is one such scientist, second only to Wernher von Braun (1912-1977) in the rocket team.
The V1 (doodle bug) had been superseded by the Vergentungswaffe 2, that is Vengeance Weapon 2. We learn some of the complications of operating, building, conceiving of such a rocket, and the humanity of those who worked on it, all through Graf’s eyes. None of the scientists and engineers are good Nazis but they are committed to the rocket as end in itself. Von Braun had joined the SS and made good use of that in this story to protect his team.
In parallel there is British Aircraftwoman Kay who studies aerial reconnaissance photographs in a London bunker as the RAF tries to find the launch site(s) so as to bomb them. Meanwhile, the Germans have learned to use mobile launchers to escape detection, and to launch mostly under cloud cover.
Kay survives not one but two V2 explosions in London and begins to take it personally. Meanwhile, Willi’s wife is killed in an RAF bombing raid that hits everything but the V2s.
Though the V2s are pinpricks in the bigger picture of 1944, they are dreadful and so a dedicated effort is assembled to target and destroy them. Kay and her slide rule are recruited to a team of RAF Aircraftwomen to go to Belgium and calculate the point of origin of the missiles by using radar signals of the launches correlated with impact locations in England. For this calculation to guide bombers to the target it has to be done in six minutes, which allows time for the RAF to strike before the Germans have dismounted the launch equipment and hidden everything in the forest.
We get more of Willi’s backstory than Kay’s, principally his long comradeship with von Braun and their mutual enthusiasm for space flight with rockets, spiced with some technical details. There is, what seemed to this reader, a pointless sidebar with a local prostitute, too.
Thanks to some (rather unbelievable) loose lips, the Nazis learn of the calculators in Belgium and target one V2 to hit them. It is Kay’s third brush with V2 death.
Unknown to each other, Kay computes angles to find Willi and company for the bombers, and Willi devises more ingenious ways to disguise the launch sites and shorten the dismounting time, while targeting one rocket to hit Kay and her squad of pencil pushers. They each have some near misses.
In the summer of 1945 they meet at a debriefing, and realise that they had been – in their own ways – trying to kill each other. The end.
About 3000 V2s were launched, half at London and half at Antwerp (the major seaport through which Allied armies were supplied). In London they killed about 3000 civilians, and injured far more. The destruction of the V1 and V2 explosions was the prime cause of homelessness in London after the war, effecting as many as 80,000 people. No doubt something similar in Antwerp was true. In producing the rockets between 12,000 – 20,000 slave labours died, either being worked to death, murdered, or hit in RAF raids on the production plants.
After the war both German generals and Allied analysts concluded the vast materiel and labour that went into the rockets detracted from the German war effort to no strategic or tactical gain. While Harris does not speculate, it is possible that Hitler’s desperate demand for wonder weapons and the resources devoted to them might have distorted German arms enough to shorten the war to some extent.
Most of the action takes place in the woodlands near Den Haag where I spent a semester in 1983. Indeed the nearest village is Wassenaar which was exactly where I was at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies. I walked through some of those woods near the seaside.
The moon is mentioned a couple of times as the goal of the rocketeers, but I thought their goal always was Mars with the Moon as an interim step, not a final goal. That is not hinted at in these pages.
In an afterword Harris says the text was written during the 2020 pandemic lockdown over some weeks. It was released on 17 September and I got it on that day via a Kindle order. Now that is a technology von Braun did not anticipate. He did however live to see a man on the moon.
The book raises the question of the morality of the rocket men, and also of the race to acquire them. In these pages they are technocrats like those that built the atomic bombs or tank chassis. Though in this case they also aimed and fired the weapons. Are they war criminals? Should they have been punished? In any event thanks to the wily von Braun, who, though he is seldom on the page, dominates the story, planned ahead and traded their technical knowledge for salvation so that more than hundred of his team were transplanted to the USA with no penalty.
And if they were war criminals for targeting civilians, then so was most of those who served Bomber Command which started the so-called City Busting bombing campaign in 1942 and continued it long past any justification, including Dresden, except vengeance. The implicit indictment of Bomber Command in Freeman Dyson’s essay ‘The Children’s Crusade’ comes to mind.
I enjoyed this book a lot and read it in two nights, the more so for the resonance of the location with my own experience, but I did find it a little thinner than some of Harris’s other historical novels. It relied more on the technical details than the emotional lives of the characters. Willi’s ambiguity comes too easily and the loss of his wife does not quite seem real. Von Braun dominates the events but remains a cipher.
The SS officer sent to raise morale is emphasised and then lost in the story. When he appears the reader takes him for pivotal figure and invests in him, only to find him both cardboard and inconsequential.