The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler's Atomic Bomb

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016 - History - 378 pages
From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Hunting Eichmann and The Perfect Mile, an epic adventure and spy story about the greatest act of sabotage in all of World War II.

It's 1942 and the Nazis are racing to be the first to build a weapon unlike any known before. They have the physicists, they have the uranium, and now all their plans depend on amassing a single ingredient: heavy water, which is produced in Norway's Vemork, the lone plant in all the world that makes this rare substance. Under threat of death, Vemork's engineers push production into overdrive.

For the Allies, the plant must be destroyed. But how would they reach the castle fortress set on a precipitous gorge in one of the coldest, most inhospitable places on Earth?

Based on a trove of top secret documents and never-before-seen diaries and letters of the saboteurs, The Winter Fortress is an arresting chronicle of a brilliant scientist, a band of spies on skies, perilous survival in the wild, sacrifice for one's country, Gestapo manhunts, soul-crushing setbacks, and a last-minute operation that would end any chance Hitler could obtain the atomic bomb--and alter the course of the war.

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About the author (2016)

Neal Bascomb was born in Denver, Colorado in 1971. Neal graduated from Miami University (Ohio) with dual degrees in Economics and English Literature. Neal's first book was Higher (Doubleday) which was chosen for a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. His other works include Perfect Mile (Houghton Mifflin), Red Mutiny (Houghton Mifflin), and Hunting Eichmann (Houghton Mifflin). In 2014 his title, The Nazi Hunters: How a Team of Spies and Survivors Captured the World's Most Notorious Nazi, made The New York Times Best Seller List.

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