The Winter Fortress:
The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb

By Neal Bascomb, 322 pages, First Mariner Books, 2016
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, June 12, 2020

We can learn a lot from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

The first time Mary, a novice producer, rewrites a wire-service story – it’s about a tsunami – for the WJM-TV evening news, her boss, the cranky Lou Grant, bluntly mocks her overblown verbiage.

“Well,” a whining Mary says, “I was just trying to make it interesting.”

Lou responds: “Mary, a tidal wave is pretty interesting all by itself. It doesn’t need your help.”

Before he started typing up the results of his extraordinary research into how Norwegian resistance fighters outfoxed the Nazis occupying their homeland, Neal Bascomb, author of “The Winter Fortress,” should have listened to Lou. Maybe then Bascomb would have realized his factual story of World War II heroism, “all by itself,” was very interesting, very exciting, very inspirational.

Instead, Bascomb overwrote. On every page, he shouted at readers, “Yeah, sure, those underground guys were swell, but hey, look at me! Look at how beautifully I write! Look at my dramatic sentences! Look, look, look!”

At the core of the book is a battle over a substance called heavy water. German scientists thought that heavy water, a hybrid of plain old H2O, was the key to the development of atomic bombs. (I would explain the physics of it, as Bascomb does at length, but every time I came to a paragraph that mentioned “deuterium,” my eyes spontaneously darted to the next page.)

The story was dramatized in the 1965 Kirk Douglas film “The Heroes of the Telemark.” (The Telemark is the remote, forbidding area of Norway in which most of the action takes place.) To produce the heavy water, the Nazis are using a Norwegian company’s plant – the “Winter Fortress” of the title – while in England and Scotland, Norwegian expatriates and their British allies plot to destroy the plant, thus to thwart Germany’s nuclear ambitions.

Meticulously, Bascomb records everything: plans, failures, meals, new plans, aches and pains, bad weather, moderate success, delays, lack of food, more new plans, more success. (I may have missed a few incidents of head-scratching and nail-clipping.) Against overwhelming odds, all of the ill-equipped, ill-fed Norwegians who humiliated the mighty Third Reich survived and remained free.

Good stuff, right?

Yeah, but Neal “Look at me!” Bascomb almost ruins it by intending to make every sentence and every page his Mona Lisa; instead, too much of his prose ended up as gaudy caricature.

To be fair, much of the detail he provides is worthwhile, such as this colorful sentence describing how Owen Roane, a Texas-born World War II bomber pilot, prepared for a mission: “Dressed for the minus-thirty-degree temperatures at high altitude (wool underwear, two pairs of wool socks, a wool sweater, a brown leather jacket lined with sheep’s wool, and heavy trousers), Roane crossed the cold, fog-ridden airfield and gathered with the other pilots and aircrews in the huge Nissen hut used for briefings.”

But I could have done without all the hair. In the space of 16 pages early in the book, Bascomb describes four of the characters and includes these details: “… a shock of dark, curly hair … a sweep of straw-colored hair … a mop of curly dark hair … a thick shock of fair hair.”

Sabotage, as you can imagine, is hairy business.

Even the details are detailed: “When dawn crept through the east-facing window, they extinguished the lamp.” What’s wrong with, “At dawn they turned off the lamp”? Or, maybe leave out the sentence entirely and trust readers to know that, even in Norway, sunlight means you don’t need lamplight?

Nearly every action succumbs to Bascomb bloat: “The four bearded, haggard men struggled with every lift of their skis in the sticky, wet snow on Lake Store Saure. Over the surrounding peaks, a mist hung like cotton wool, and the cloud-ridden sky hid the relief of the sun. Trudging forward, they cursed their hunger, their waterlogged skis, and the cut of the wind.”

Yes, “trudging forward” is an apt description for them. And me.

“The Winter Fortress” reminds me of a much-praised book that suffered from the same overwriting: “The Boys in the Boat.” Now, before you University of Washington zealots – zealotry is a major at the UDub – assault me with your pith and vinegar, I acknowledge that “Boys” told a thrilling story of how the Husky underdogs (Hah!) starred in Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics. But every sentence seemed larded with excess, as if that author, Daniel James Brown, thought it was his prose contending for the gold.

(Even the author’s name is overwritten.)

I confess: I too overwrite. (My former editors on the address list are simultaneously nodding.) But I think my effort to curb my own excesses helps me spot them in the work of others.

Both “The Boys in the Boat” and “The Winter Fortress” are worthwhile histories. Both authors are outstanding researchers. I just wish they hadn’t created the literary equivalents of the exaggerated pomposity in Ted Baxter’s diction.