Operation Emigrant

This book describes a critical aspect of the life-and-death struggle during World War Two between Britain's famous Special Operations Executive and Nazi Germany's multi-layered police and intelligence agencies, led by the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst and the Abwehr. Charged with fomenting underground resistance and armed uprisings in Europe's occupied countries, the British agents in ingenious ways infiltrated German-held territory, smuggled weapons and explosives to local partisans, and liberated enemy key personnel to obtain advance information about Germany's technological advances, secret weapons systems, and the internal weak points, the endemic Achilles Heel of every totalitarian state.

The main plot is typical of SOE's incredibly daring projects during the years of the war when Britain fought the most desperate battles with her back against the wall: One single slip-up could mean the downfall of the Empire and the possible permanent loss of Western civilization on the European continent. It is today easy to forget how near we came to permanent disaster with Hitler's attempt to establish a thousand-year Reich to usurp and exploit the resources of the continent and unleash upon it a dark age of suppression by a self-appointed Master Race.

Having received information about the looming threat of the V-2, a new and more powerful rocket version of the pulse jet powered V-1 that had wrought extensive damage in London and southern England, the SOE decides to insert a team of its agents to liberate and spirit away one of the scientists working at the Peenemunde test facility on the Baltic Sea. The plot also involves the evolving program of mass annihilation of Germany's Jewish population, which was gaining momentum as extermination camps were being built in Poland to carry out mass murder on an industrial scale.

The author, whose intimate knowledge of the wartime scene derives from personal participation throughout the entire war leans on this unique experience to insert a fictional plot in a narrative that is historically correct in every detail. In addition to a spellbinding story, the reader receives an inside story of perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the war that shaped the world we live in today.

Tom Lowell, a college professor and a native of Boston, is seeking personal revenge for the Nazi state's concentration camp murder of his German-Jewish sweetheart, fighting first as a Hurricane pilot in the Royal Air Force and later as an agent of the Special Operations Executive. In his role as an implacable avenger, Lowell meets a woman whose plight as a fugitive hunted by the Gestapo adds a wartime love story to a breath-taking pursuit.