Susan WilliamsSpies in the Congo: America's Atomic Mission in World War II

The author knows her subject. It is well written and tells a story that has not been told in as much detail. I appreciated the way the Americans and English always referred to diamonds so that no one would know they were talking about uranium. Even the 007 novel Diamond's are Forever, was actually based on MI-6 in Africa intercepting uranium smugglers but always referring to it as diamonds. If you are interested in the OSS and MI-6 operations during WWII then you will find this a book well worth skimming. If you are looking for a spy thriller then this is not for you. My personal pet peeve was that there was much detail and discussion of personalities that documented the day to day activities but did not help explain anything. The next book for Ms. Williams would logically be to track down and interview those in Washington who were making the decisions and moving agents around the world to acquire all of the weapons grade uranium for the Manhattan project while preventing the Nazis from getting any without giving away how important it was.

Thorough research on a topic that did not need thorough research. Filled with way too many details, this poorly edited book recounts how the government kept a close watch on the uranium mine in the Congo from which it took the raw material for the bombs dropped on Japan. It will be of interest perhaps to families of the spooks involved, many of whom died prematurely because no precautions were taken to limit their exposure to radiation. Questions that are NOT covered in the book are a more in-depth examination of why the Germans did not give the hunt for uranium a higher priority, why the Japanese interest in uranium discovered AFTER WW II, was unknown at the time, whether the US really should have dropped the bombs since many knew that Japan had been defeated and would soon surrender without the need for bombs, among others. There were several attempts on the life of one of the key characters, but the book does not delve into who might have been behind the attempts. I read this book because it was a choice of a book club. The book club ended up discussing WW II and the bomb more broadly, rather than the intricacies of the Congo spying.

I very much enjoyed this book . Very well researched and very interesting topic. It was however, hard to follow sometimes. I imagine due to the complexity of the situation of which the book was written .

Now that you have read the title of this reivew, you have the plot summary of the first half of this book. It's just personnel assignments and very little action.

Interesting story but too much soap opera drama and not enough factual material in it. The disc was good and the narrator was good. I was expecting to learn more about the mining and intrigue of the Congo uranium mining than this drama contained.

Do you know where the Uranium ore came from that went into America's atomic bomb? This story along with the efforts to keep ore out of Nazi hands is an interesting side note to the history of the atomic bomb.

An interesting read

Bon produit...

Very disappointing book. Incredible level of details on persons involved in spying in parts of Africa during WW-2 (their height, colour of the eyes, whether they were good looking or not, hobbies, name of the wife, correspondence with the wife, whether they got malaria or dysentery in Africa, etc) but there is no story to tell. The author and her research assistants went through declassified OSS files, and this became the book. Some elements are repeated 20+ times. Unfortunately, I learned nothing about what could have been interesting in this story, i.e. how the US and Manhattan project got hold of the uranium from the Congo. This is covered in a few pages in the introduction, and the rest of the book is about sending a few spies to the Congo to investigate something that did not happen, i.e the smuggling of uranium to Germany.

Cet ouvrage narre en détail la manière dont les États-Unis se sont assurés la maîtrise des ressources uranifères du haut Katanga (une province du Congo Belge) pour alimenter en mirerai d'uranium le projet Manhattan qui à l’origine manquait cruellement de ressources minières, hormis une mine très riche en uranium située au Canada. On estime que le programme nucléaire américain qui a été mené à bien en trois ans et demi à consommé 6 000 tonnes d'oxyde d'uranium (U3O8) dont les deux tiers provenaient de la province du Haut Katanga, un tiers du gisement canadien et le reliquat de sous-produits de l'extraction minière d'autres métaux stratégiques (tungstène) réalisée sur le territoire des États-Unis. A l'instar de la France qui via Frédéric Joliot-Curie avait tenté pour le compte du ministère de l'armement français dirigé par Raoul Dautry de négocier un accord d'exclusivité avec Edgar Sengier président de l'Union Minière du Haut Katanga (société de droit privé belge) qui avait le monopole de l'extraction uranifère en cette lointaine époque : pour faire court l'affaire échoua pour des raisons de montage juridique et de toute façon la débâcle de mai/juin 1940 mit un terme à l'aventure nucléaire française qui était pourtant en avance sur les autres pays, le physicien Francis Perrin était le premier a avoir effectué des travaux portant sur la nécessité d'un réflecteur neutronique pour abaisser la masse critique de fissile. Toujours est-il que les scientifiques français (Halban, Kowarsky, Guéron et Auger) furent transbordés avec le stock d'eau lourde français au Royaume-Uni ou des accords furent conclus avec "Tube Alloys" l'entité en charge des applications militaires de l'atome, mais jamais les Français ne furent admis sur le projet Manhattan, mais uniquement sur le programme de pile nucléaire de Chalk River au Canada (seul Bertrand Goldschmidt travailla de manière secondaire pendant trois à quatre semaine auprès de Glen Seaborg, l'inventeur du plutonium). Toujours est-il que les nazis firent main basse sur l'usine de production d'eau lourde de Vemork en Norvège et sur un stock de 1000 tonnes d'oxyde d'uranium en Belgique, stock qui était en instance de départ pour les États-Unis. C'est d'ailleurs la crainte d'un programme nucléaire militaire puissant en Allemagne qui poussa Roosevelt à lancer ce qui deviendrait le MED. Un des soucis permanents de Leslie Grove qui fut le coordinateur du programme US fut pendant et après la guerre de s'assurer d'un contrôle physique des matières premières ce qui conduisit à la création en 1943 du Combined Development Trust (rassemblant aussi le Canada et le Royaume-Uni). L'ouvrage nous fournit en détail les actions qui furent conduites sur le terrain en Afrique pour contrer les actions des nazis et assurer le monopole anglo-saxon sur l'uranium : absolument passionnant.

Très bon livre ! On ne fait jamais état de ce que l'Afrique a apporté et apporte au monde de grandiose : civilisation égyptienne et autres, matières premières, etc. Mais quand il s'agit de famine, de guerres tribales et de réfugiés économiques, elle est en première page !!