Projekt 1065 by Alan Gratz (review)

Defeat at Stalingrad has turned the tide of war against Germany, but Hitler’s desperation to keep the military machine humming means that ever younger soldiers are drafted into service, and ever younger Hitler Youth are called into perilous duties on the homefront. Michael O’Shaunessey, son of the Irish ambassador to the Reich, should be able to coast through the war exempt from involvement, but his parents are spies on behalf of Great Britain, and Michael’s apparently gung-ho embrace of the Hitler Youth is at once a solid cover for the family’s covert activities and an opportunity to ferret out vital information. When boys are recruited to form a search party to find a downed British pilot, it’s Michael who gets there first and whisks Simon Cohen into hiding at the embassy. As the friend of an engineer’s son, Michael gets a peek at the blueprints for Projekt 1065, a proposed fighter plane with jets rather than propellers; as a member of an elite Youth team, Michael is positioned to abort the assassination of an atomic energy physicist at a science convention in Switzerland. Michael’s running anti-Nazi snark, together with his pugilistic skills and uncanny propensity to be in the right place at the right time, bespeaks a boy-hero from a comic book or radio serial. Gratz pursues a more serious, challenging theme, however, when the elder O’Shaunesseys force themselves into the role of uninvolved bystanders of atrocities in order to complete their spy mission, and when Simon Cohen takes a fatal bullet so Michael can ultimately save the physicist and thereby advance American development of the atom bomb. An author’s note touches on the espionage activities of “neutral” Ireland during World War II as well as the Hitler Youth movement.