A Book By Sam Kean

In preparation to watch the new film, Oppenheimer, I decided to get a bit of background on some of the events leading up to the development of the Manhattan project, and ultimately stumbled onto this book from listening to a podcast about it. While one could assume that the nuclear bomb was developed in an isolated vacuum to win World War II, this book lays out exactly how close we could have come to dealing with a nuclear-powered Nazi regime settling scores all over Europe and more. The Bastard Brigade – The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb by Sam Kean is a well-researched book about the various people that worked towards the ultimate goal of stopping the Nazi nuclear program dead in its tracks. While this was no coordinated unit of any nature, everyone profiled in this book did their part to protect the Western World from possible destruction.

“Scientists have always kept secrets. But rarely have the secrets been as vital as they were during World War II. In the middle of building an atomic bomb, the leaders of the Manhattan Project were alarmed to learn that Nazi Germany was far outpacing the Allies in nuclear weapons research. Hitler, with just a few pounds of uranium, would have the capability to reverse the entire D-Day operation and conquer Europe. So they assembled a rough and motley crew of geniuses — dubbed the Alsos Mission — and sent them careening into Axis territory to spy on, sabotage, and even assassinate members of Nazi Germany’s feared Uranium Club.”

The following are some of the characters this book discusses:

• Moe Berg, A retired and ageing Major League Baseball catcher who abandoned the game for a career as a multilingual international spy. He was one of the first people to covertly collect footage of the Imperial palace in Japan, and used his linguistic skills to become one of the first nuclear spies for America.
• Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist credited as the discoverer of quantum mechanics; Heisenberg was a key contributor to the Nazi’s atomic bomb project and the primary target of the Alsos Mission. There were fears that the Nazi nuclear program was years ahead of America’s, but it turns out they had become obsessed with using so-called “heavy water” and stalled themselves trying to secure massive amounts of it.
• Colonel Boris Pash, featured as a character in Oppenheimer, he was known to extract information from targets “by any means necessary.” A former high school science teacher and veteran of the Russian Revolution (in The White Army) who fled the Soviet Union. He harbored a deep hatred for Communists and who later led the Alsos mission.
• Joe Kennedy Jr., the charismatic, thrill-seeking older brother of President John F. Kennedy whose need for adventure led him to volunteer for the most dangerous missions the Navy had to offer. This ultimately led to his fate of dying in a plane crash testing a system to destroy the new V3 guns, suspected of being a nuclear delivery cannon. Although many did not “officially” realize the exact reason why he passed until much later.
• Samuel Goudsmit, a washed-up physics prodigy who spent his life hunting Nazi scientists — and his parents, who had been swept into a concentration camp — across the globe. What he found sickened him to the core.
• Irène and Frederic Joliot-Curie, a physics Nobel-Prize winning power couple who used their unassuming status as scientists to become active members of the resistance.
• J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man that headed the Manhattan Project, suspected of having Communist ties, and falling under the watchful eye of Colonel Boris Pash until Pash was mysterious sent to the field to do covert work. Oppenheimer is not discussed a lot in this book, but his presence is felt throughout.

Honestly, my favorite part of this book was a story of a Norwegian covert mission funded by the British that sent saboteurs to Vemork Hydroelectric Power Plant to end Germany’s “heavy water” production scheme. On February 27, 1942, nine saboteurs scaled a sheer cliff face in the middle of the night during a blizzard to destroy a Nazi-controlled heavy water plant in Norway. Armed with fake credentials and a plan to pretend to be British soldiers, they wanted to ensure that The Nazis did not exact revenge on the villages nearby, which was often the policy if any one person was seen to be “an Allied Collaborator”. This has apparently been turned into a few films such as The Heroes of Telemark, starring Kirk Douglas, but I would love to see a modern take on it. Sadly, the destruction only slightly slowed the Nazis down, but the story of the heroic adventures these guys had is legendary. Speaking of the British, they come across as pretty inept in terms of their special forces during this time, I have no idea if the author has bias or if they were really that bad, but it seems like a small miracle that anything good came from this mission at all.

Overall, this was an awesome read and something I plowed through very quickly. Some stories presented in the book were better than others, but what was available could easily be their own books in some capacity. Hell, some of them like the aforementioned Norwegian spy mission and the story of Moe Berg could make great Hollywood films! If you plan to, or have already seen, Oppenheimer, I would recommend this book as a perfect companion read. Some of the “characters” from this book show up in the film, and getting some backstory would make those scenes make more sense. This is one of my favorite books of the year so far.