Books Bookshelf â€ëœthe Bastard Brigadeã¢â‚¬â„¢ Review Stopping the Nazi Bomb

A Nazi atomic flop? The fear that Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, and other Nobel-winning German physicists would develop nuclear weapons for Adolf Hitler began to seize hold in the upper reaches of the American regime when Albert Einstein'south letter to President Franklin Roosevelt arrived in the White House in Baronial 1939.

Merely it wasn't long earlier speculation about High german nuclear research reached a much wider public. "No one had heard of uranium fission before Jan 1939; past Dec, more than than a hundred papers on the topic had appeared worldwide." And the fright of a Nazi diminutive bomb was well founded. "Two years before the start of the Manhattan Project" . . . Germany'south "Uranium Order had scientists working on two key aspects of nuclear weapons: enriching uranium and producing a cocky-sustaining chain reaction. The German atomic flop projection was off to a rip-roaring start."

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The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Diminutive Bomb by Sam Kean (2019) 465 pages @@@@ (4 out of 5)

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Given the universal perception that German physicists were the best in the earth, the Allies feared a nuclear set on almost throughout the war—equally tardily equally the middle of 1944. And that was fifty-fifty without assuming the Nazis had succeeded in building an atomic bomb, because simply a small quantity of radioactive cloth is needed. "Fear of dirty bombs continued to fester in the minds of American official in the run-upwardly to June six," and planes were sent with Geiger counters to sweep the northern coast of France in advance of the Normandy invasion.

Unaccountably, then, the Allies had launched the Alsos Mission to investigate how far the Nazis had progressed in the field just in September 1943. "People called information technology the Bounder Unit" because it worked independently, hence the title of Sam Kean'southward ofttimes jaw-dropping account of the perilous effort to explore and undermine the German nuclear program.

Other efforts to undermine the German atomic bomb project

The Alsos Mission was not the Allies' offset or only effort to hobble the Nazi diminutive bomb projection, and for skillful reason. In fact, fully aware that the Germans used large quantities of heavy h2o in their research, there were multiple efforts nearly throughout the state of war (1940-44) to blow up the globe's only large-scale deuterium-production found at Vemork in Kingdom of norway, to steal huge shipments of the stuff, and (in 1944) to destroy a send thought to be carrying tons of it on its fashion to Frg. Merely it wasn't until September 1943 that the British and Americans launched the Alsos mission.

The broad telescopic of the mission

Groovy United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland and the United States organized the Alsos Mission in the wake of the September 1943 Allied invasion of Italian republic to assess the Nazis' progress toward creating nuclear, chemic, and biological weapons and the technology to deliver them—and to prevent their capture by the Soviet Union. In addition to the nuclear program, the mission focused on the High german "Vengeance-weapons"—the V-1 cruise missile, 5-2 ballistic missile, and V-3 cannon—all of which American armed forces leaders feared might conduct atomic warheads. The more ane hundred soldiers, spies, and scientists who eventually joined the mission followed closely backside the forepart lines in Italia, France, and Germany as the Allies closed in on the German heartland. From time to time they crossed into enemy-held territory to grab valuable resources before the Germans could destroy them or snatch Nazi scientists before they could escape or fall into Soviet hands.

Characters out of the history books

The amazing tale Sam Kean tells in The Bastard Brigade revolves around a handful of extraordinary characters:

• Moe Berg, the eccentric erstwhile Major League Baseball game catcher who spoke at least half a dozen languages and worked as a spy for the OSS: "he could read hieroglyphics and recite Edgar Allan Poe's unabridged poetic oeuvre . . . [and] bought dictionaries 'to see if they were complete.'"
• Dutch-built-in American physicist Samuel Goudsmit, the chief scientist for the Alsos Mission whose parents died at Auschwitz
• Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, author of the Uncertainty Principle and head of the Nazi diminutive bomb program. Kean describes him every bit "substantially a boy scout with a hypertrophied brain."
• The Nobel Laureate married man-and-wife team of Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie, both agile in the French Resistance
• Joe Kennedy, Jr., JFK's older brother who perished in a spectacular plane crash every bit a Navy pilot in Globe State of war II. Kennedy was engaged in a vainglorious try to best his brother's medal-winning feats on PT-109. He died on what in hindsight was clearly a futile mission to destroy what Dwight Eisenhower feared was a High german launch site in northern France for nuclear weapons.
• US Ground forces Colonel Boris Pash, a veteran of the White Army in the Russian Civil State of war who taught physical education and scientific discipline at Hollywood Loftier and later headed the Alsos Mission for the Allies

Every one of these exceptional people has been the subject of multiple references in history books and, in some cases, many biographies every bit well. The same goes for many of the fourteen people Kean cites at the back of the volume in a list of small characters. The Bastard Brigade is, above all, an business relationship about people whose stories deserve to be told.

American and British troops dismantling Werner Heisenberg'due south experimental
German language nuclear reactor in April 1945. Epitome credit: Wikipedia

How this book is organized

Kean has done an admirable chore organizing the unruly material that underpins his story. The Bounder Brigade is divided into vi sections, each roughly corresponding to one year of the war ("Prewar, to 1939," "1940-41," "1942," and then forth). In each section, he traces the trajectory of the principal characters as they moved always closer to intersecting in the Alsos mission. Only in doing and then, Kean often digresses, layering in colorful tales that help to mankind out the leading actors in the high-stakes game of nuclear competition. Many of those digressions might accept hit the cutting-room flooring in a volume written by an academic historian. But for Kean—and the reader—they add together color and depth that would otherwise be missing from a recitation of facts in chronological order.

Kean's use of these oft piffling-known episodes and insights is sometimes delightful. Here are just a few examples:

• Moe Berg's tendency to wander off on his own when he became bored with his missions for the OSS.
• The facts that Joe Kennedy "was a terrible pilot" and the plane that killed him was a flying flop jam-packed with explosives
• The High german plans for the 5-3 Hochdruckpumpe (high-pressure pump) or "Busy Lizzie," a 416-pes cannon that shot 9-foot bullets.

Sam Kean writes in a style that'due south best described as loose. Coincidental, if you will. Conversational. Vernacular. Fifty-fifty occasionally globe-trotting over the line into sexual innuendo or scatological allusions. This approach makes for an easier and faster read, but it tin can be jarring. And at times it detracts from the impact of the surprises he dug out of the historical tape. The upshot is that Kean's style cheapens this otherwise revealing and enjoyable volume.

For further reading

I've as well reviewed Caesar'southward Concluding Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Usa by Sam Kean (An eye-opening book about air).

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And you lot can always find my about popular reviews, and the most recent ones, plus a guide to this whole site, on the Dwelling Page.

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Source: https://malwarwickonbooks.com/nazi-atomic-bomb/