The dreadful global conflagration known as the Second World War was more than the clashing of great armies on bloody battlefields. A different kind of war was being waged in the secret laboratories on both sides of the conflict -- a war that would alter the course and determine the outcome of the bitter hostilities, forever changing our world and future. In a stunning amalgam of science and history, Tom Shachtman, the critically acclaimed author of Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold and The Phony War, 1939-1940, gives us a riveting chronicle of World War II's forgotten combatants: the engineers, physicists, chemists, and academics whose contributions to the war effort were as important as the noble sacrifices of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who bravely risked their lives. While it is a widely accepted fact that America's development and employment of the atomic bomb ended the Pacific struggle -- and that the failure of Hitler's scientists to develop their own A-bomb helped to doom Germany -- little note has been made of the other remarkable scientific accomplishments of this dark and terrible epoch. Beginning with a fascinating overview of the Depression-era struggle to establish scientific and military alliances that would ultimately enable the Allies to catch up to the Axis's early dominance, Terrors and Marvels offers an eye-opening history of the furious battles for technological superiority covertly waged by the world's most brilliant minds. From the creation of faster, deadlier jets and rockets to the development of biological, chemical, and electronic warfare -- from astonishing advances in medical science to breakthroughs in radar and decoding -- the incredible successes and failures that occurred in top-secret facilities around the world in the early 1940s never made headlines but often determined triumph and defeat. Here, also, are the intensely human stories of the architects of the terrifying war machines -- men and women of rare intelligence and integrity torn by the conflicting demands of conscience and country, haunted by their roles in the use and abuse of powerful science. Edifying, enthralling, startling, and sobering, Terrors and Marvels is a masterful work that sheds light on the astonishing achievements of a remarkable few and the great and terrible technology that swung the pendulum of victory in the Allies' direction. FROM THE CRITICS Publishers Weekly There was more to WWII science than the atomic bomb, demonstrates Shachtman (Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold) in his fascinating history of the use of intelligent machines in the conflict. He traces the development of scientifically engineered weapons such as poison gases, encoding devices (like ENIGMA), rockets, radar and early heat-seeking defenses, showing how both sides relied to an unprecedented extent on the work of scientists. Germany's defeat on the scientific front, Shachtman argues, was due largely to Hitler's sluggishness in making full use of his researchers and to the Third Reich's predilection for flashy, impractical weapons over the more mundane, efficient ones that could counter Allied bombs. Moving back and forth between Allied and Axis advances, Shachtman dramatically captures the breakneck pace of research and the charged atmosphere of the WWII lab. He examines the effects of scientific developments on pivotal battles, and he also profiles individual engineers, chemists, physicists and biologists in Europe and Japan. In addition, Shachtman shows how developments during the period would later improve the lot of postwar consumers.

The impeccably researched, taut volume maintains its focus on the role of science without drowning in voluminous WWII historical material. This effortlessly readable text will be of interest to fans of history and science, and to the casual reader as well. 360 pages. HarperCollins Publishers 0-380-97876-8 / 9780380978762
Hardcover Brand New Brand New Book Jacket New York 

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