Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.07 AVERAGE
4.07 AVERAGE
This is a reconstruction of the SOE mission to sabotage the HydroNorsk plant in Vemork, Norway, to prevent the Nazis from acquiring heavy water. This is a gripping story, as the team of resistance agents escape Norway, get training in Britain and are dispatched back (several groups of them disastrously into the hands of the occupying SS) to undertake a brutal ski assault on a remote industrial compound, expected to be a one-way trip. Unfortunately, this is written for a popular audience, so all the work in Norwegian and declassified SOE papers is obscured with the sloppy citations in the back and no weighing of the primary material at all.
medium-paced
adventurous
informative
tense
medium-paced
I first learned about the mission to sabotage Norsk Hydro while reading Steve Sheinkin's Bomb, and I was so fascinated that I wanted to learn more about it. Bascomb's book was a great resource and really helped me wrap my head around the details. It is a fascinating chapter in history. I did sometimes get lost in the details, but overall I appreciated Bascomb's in-depth approach.
informative
slow-paced
adventurous
challenging
informative
tense
medium-paced
adventurous
emotional
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
When talking about a page-turner such as this it's customary to say it reads like a novel. I can't really say that about this because this story, or these stories, rather, are too fantastic to be believable. And yet it's true.
The Winter Fortress is about the efforts of Norwegian and British commandos from the SOE (Special Operations Executive), also known as the Office of Ungentlemanly Warfare, to destroy the heavy water-making capabilities of a power plant in Norway. The effort that goes into this is almost superhuman, especially on behalf of the team that is assigned to be the welcoming committee in the inhospitable Norwegian Vidda.
A small spoiler here: it's easy to wonder why all this effort was put into disabling a plant that easily could have been bombed to smithereens by the allies. That question is answered in the book.
This book is up there with Alex Kershaw's The First Wave and Adam Makos' Spearhead, and that's the highest praise I can give to a WWII book.
The Winter Fortress is about the efforts of Norwegian and British commandos from the SOE (Special Operations Executive), also known as the Office of Ungentlemanly Warfare, to destroy the heavy water-making capabilities of a power plant in Norway. The effort that goes into this is almost superhuman, especially on behalf of the team that is assigned to be the welcoming committee in the inhospitable Norwegian Vidda.
A small spoiler here: it's easy to wonder why all this effort was put into disabling a plant that easily could have been bombed to smithereens by the allies. That question is answered in the book.
This book is up there with Alex Kershaw's The First Wave and Adam Makos' Spearhead, and that's the highest praise I can give to a WWII book.
adventurous
tense
slow-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
medium-paced