Word: peenem
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...Michael Anderson sedately re-creates some rather tumultuous sessions of British officialdom in 1943, reducing history to a few thoughtful demurrers from Churchill's scientific adviser, Professor F. A. Lindemann (Trevor Howard). "It's a balloon," he remarks, peering through his pipe smoke at photographs of the Peenemünde launching site. And: "If it were a rocket, it could never get off the ground...
...generate suspense, Crossbow occasionally switches over to the Nazi side. Peenemünde, before the massive allied attack, is a hive of hard-working scientists and tight-lipped SS men, so earnest about perfecting their flying bomb that they put a cockpit in it and sacrifice four brave pilots in trials...
That's about the only surprise in the new novel by Pierre Boulle (Bridge Over the River Kwai). A shallow attempt at fictionalizing the space age, it traces a handful of Axis rocket engineers from Peenemünde, where they "romantically" built Hitler's V-2s, into the diaspora of the postwar world, where they end up glumly competing with one another in the U.S.-Soviet space race. There is Stern, a faint carbon copy of Wernher von Braun who talks like a cross between Tom Swift and Astroboy. There is Nadia, his luscious White Russian assistant...
...French Foreign Legion in 1916 and the U.S. Foreign Service in 1920, where later, as a wartime consul in neutral Sweden, he earned the U.S.'s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, for personal espionage that pinpointed Nazi Germany's V-2 rocket bases at Peenemünde; of a heart attack; in San Diego's U.S. Naval Hospital...
...Peenemünde South. Huntsville, Ala., headquarters of Dr. Wernher von Braun...