Stealing Hitler’s Rocket Author: Guy Walters ISBN-13: 978-1035910854Publisher: Head of Zeus Guideline Price: £25; 304ppOn July 12th, 1944, a column of muddy Nazi soldiers in rural Poland flagged down two trucks driven by men wearing German uniforms and asked for a lift. They sat on cylinders in the back, smoking, drying out and cursing the weather. After about half an hour they jumped off, one of them quipping to their new friends: “You carry air!”As Guy Walters observes in his moving and suspenseful book, it was “one of those moments that history would call improbable if the documents [to prove it] did not exist”. The drivers were members of Poland’s resistance movement in disguise, transporting a cargo that could have meant instant death if their passengers had taken a closer look. Those cylinders contained the stolen components of a V-2 rocket, the world’s first long-range ballistic missile and potentially the key to a Nazi victory.“My Wunderwaffe [wonder weapon] will have a decisive effect on the war,” Adolf Hitler boasted to his generals. “The enemy will have no defence against it.” Almost 50ft tall, the V-2 could be blasted to the edge of space before silently descending to Earth at supersonic speed and killing civilians with precisely zero warning.Worried that Hitler was right, British scientists desperately wanted to examine a live specimen for potential weaknesses. When intelligence reports came through that a test V-2 had crashed almost intact into a remote Polish marsh, they saw their chance. A frantic race ensued, with pilots, partisans and politicians all playing crucial roles in what sometimes reads like an old-school war comic.Walters does a highly efficient job of reconstructing this surprisingly little-known episode from every side’s perspective, bolstered by his own emotional visits to the places where it happened. Wisely, he focuses less on technological details and more on complex personalities such as Nazi engineer Wernher von Braun, who later pioneered the US moon landings. [ No one sent up Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun better than satirist Tom LehrerOpens in new window ]“Science… is like a knife,” he protested when asked about his sinister past. “If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.”Walters, also the author of several second World War thrillers, occasionally goes a little too far by inventing dialogue or imagining people’s thought processes. This reservation aside, Stealing Hitler’s Rocket is a thoroughly engaging story of everyday heroism – and practically crying out to be filmed.Andrew Lynch is a freelance reviewer