ONE OF OUR MOST RELIABLE NOVELISTS:

The source for the novelist's description of the V2 ballistic rocket program was The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (1995) by Michael J. Neufeld. It is listed at the end of the novel. Readers interested in the details of the German rocket program should turn to Neufeld. Otherwise, stay with the digest presented by author Robert Harris; this work is so accurate I would have described V2 as a "nonfiction novel."

The story is set during and beyond five days in November 1944 when V2 rockets rained down on London and involves two imaginary characters whose lives intertwine: On the defensive side of the German rocket bombing is Kay Cotan-Walsh, an English officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Lt. Cotan-Walsh is determined to play an active role in the conflict. On the offensive side is Dr. Rudi Graf, a rocket engineer and longtime associate of Dr. Wernher von Braun. (I have a hunch that Graf is based upon a young Luftwaffe officer posted to the rocket program. In his 1996 memoir The Peenemünde Wind Tunnels, listed as a source of the novelist, Peter P. Wegener reveals that he witnessed the horrible treatment of slaves in the underground rocket factory after he was led into the inferno by Dr. von Braun. This induced him not to join von Braun's team. He immigrated to the U.S. and became a Navy employee and subsequently a professor at Yale University.)

As novelist Robert Harris points out in a brief author's note: "Apart from such well-known historical figures as Wernher von Braun and SS General Hans Kammler, my cast of characters and their particular adventures are all purely imaginary." While von Braun is well-known, General Kammler is not. Trained as an architect, he is known to have designed and supervised the construction of both Auschwitz in Poland and the underground rocket production factory at Nordhausen, Germany. He is, without doubt, the personification of the devil, something readers will draw from the novel and confirmed by my own research.

Harris is a talented writer and has orchestrated an especially interesting and suspenseful storyline that not only creates realistic and sympathetic characters but informs the reader of the historic introduction of ballistic rockets to modern warfare. But, as Harris points out in his acknowledgments, it was a costly military asset that contributed nothing to either Nazi Germany's military prowess or the outcome of the war. 

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