The Worst Atrocity - David Epstein - Bog

The backdrop is WWII (Europe, 1939 - 1945). The episode, code named Op. Valkyrie aka ''The Revolution of 20 July 1944''. An English Glider Pilot, recouperating from wounds incurred on D-Day (06/06/44, is temporarily attached to a ''flight pool'' ferrying British Intellegence agents to the Continent. A few weeks before D-Day, the German Resistence (GR) movement, desperately seeking Western Allied support, approached the American OSS agent, A. Dulles, with a plan for the elimination of Hitler and a quick end to the war. It was ignored in London and Washington. The stumbling block was Unconditional Surrender (01/43) which loudly proclaimed: "All Germans are our Enemies." A few weeks after D-Day, he flys a Senior British agent to an urgent meeting in Holland, with a German General (GG), a prominent member of the Widerstand, whose formal arguments did not get very far, but the mere mention of the plight of ''hostage-Europe'' did. Why couldn''t the Widerstand see that this was the Aiies ''Achilles heel''? it was their trump card. They didn''t play it, so the Glider Pilot did. He is sold on the quest for a joint venture, but a legacy of real (or imaginary) double-crosses dogged Anglo-GR relations both before and during the war. Inexorably, he finds himself drawn into a veritable ''hornet''s nest'' of intrigue, surrounding what should have been the most decisive single operation of the war. Britain did not get it. At the very least, the Widerstrand was a ''tool'' for acheiving Allied war objectives. Britian cound not comprehend that it wasn''t just an Anglo-German affair, but that their was a third party that was anxiously awaiting the outcome of this meeting. The explosion that was to have toppled Nazism, imploaded on itself crushing the German Resistence movement abruptly terminating any hope of early liberation for ''hostage-Europe''. WWII Army Vet. PhD, Theoretical Nuclear Physics, NYU (1960). Worked on Submarine Nuclear Reactors & Anti-Submarine Warfare. Professor of Physics & Director of Oceanography, SUNY, Maritime College, 1964. Retired 1995. Avid student, Military History. Interested in WWII episode code named Op-Valkyrie; Anglo - German Resistance (GR) relations prior to and during the war. Book is part autobiography, part history, and part novel.