Assault in Norway; Sabotaging the Nazi Nuclear Program
Guilford, CT: Lyons Press [An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield], 2002. First Lyons Press Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing thus. Trade paperback. xi, [3], 192, [2] pages. Map. Index. Originally published in 1975 and has become a classic work on this topic. This is an insightful account of the successful 1942 commando raid against the strategic-material (heavy water) plant at Vemork designed to destroy supplies and cripple key production facilities. The German program was set back for months. Thomas Gallagher was a widely published journalist and the author of eight books. His novel The Gathering Darkness was nominated for a National Book Award. Mr. Gallagher was born in Manhattan in 1918. After graduating from Columbia College in 1941, he served in Iran during World War II as a civilian attached to the Army Corps of Engineers. He then shipped out as a seaman on freighters with the merchant marine, where he began to write. His well-received first novel, "The Gathering Darkness" (Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), traced the disintegration of a New York family after it lost its fortune in the stock market crash of 1929. Although he continued to write novels, Mr. Gallagher also turned to nonfiction, producing "Fire at Sea" , an investigation of the 1934 fire that destroyed the luxury liner Morro Castle off the New Jersey coast. Mr. Gallagher concluded that rather than being an accident, the fire was set by the ship's sociopathic radio officer. The book won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for nonfiction. More