About the author: Tony Kenrick, an Australian, as born in 1935. See this biography.
Locale: Germany, France, and England
Major characters:
- Wilhelm Lauter, trying to finish WWII ... in 1978
- Hoff, a bank teller
- Deiter Bruning, an engineer
- Uher, a pilot with his own plane
- Jim Pelham, an insurance investigator
- Rossi Sruder, his stylish girlfriend
- Brian Jakes, British Ministry of Defense
Synopsis: The story is told in alternating accounts of Wilhelm Lauter and Jim Pelham.
As a young man, Wilhelm Lauter was in the German Luftwaffe in WWII; devoted to the cause of the Third Reich. He was deeply depressed by death of Hitler and the German surrender in 1945, and hoped someday to be able to help Germany achieve the Third Reich goals.
A chance conversation reveals to Lauter the Nazis built 81 V-1 flying bomb launch sites in northern France, but all postwar documents reference the discovery and destruction of only 80. Encouraged by the hope that one was missed and may still be made operational, he begins a search to find the 81st site; which he eventually does after many years of looking.
Lauter acquires the remote farm which contains the site, deep in the woods. The launch site and materials had been carefully installed and just await assembly. He enlists the help of Nazi symphatizers Hoff, a bank teller; Deiter Bruning, an engineer; and Uher, a pilot. The plan is to send a V-1 to London, only this time with a nuclear warhead.
Jim Pelham is an American, working as an insurance investigator in London. Three buildings are destroyed by an immense explosion, and, suspecting a gas explosion, he is sent to the site to report. It doesn't look like a gas explosion. He finds a louvered panel with German markings in the wreckage, and finds it is part of a Nazi V-1 flying bomb.
Pelham realizes that since the V-1 was a terror weapon and never meant for mass destruction, that this bomb may only he a test for something more to come.
Review: I take this book off the shelf every few years - it is a tense cat-and-mouse game. The alternating accounts of Lauter and Pelham are effective, note that they are staggered in time as Pelham does not become involved until the first test V-1 is flown; so the Lauter account is told in retrospect.
This is a good view into the workings of the V-1. I read a techincal description of the V-1 and everything matches. The method of getting a rocket into England without radar seeing it is clever and believable. The ending is tense until the last.
One point the reader may wonder: Could such a site be preserved after 33 years of hidden neglect? I live on the coast, near to a number of WWII defense installations, now mostly public parks. I have marveled at their state of preservation 70+ years later. One semi-underground bunker has the date '1944' cast in the concrete over the door, and I am always awed by the fact that such a facility, built to last, would be obsolete and abandoned just one year later.
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