What’s a war book without a dead Nazi?

Objections are raised to a cracking new children’s book on account of a dead German soldier and pictures of frostbite. But the young adore grisly bits, says Robert Gore-Langton

There’s a cracking new children’s book out, Mission Telemark, by the award-winning writer Amanda Mitchison. It is set in the second world war and it’s based on the story of the Norwegian sabotage raid on Hitler’s ‘heavy water’ atomic plant in Telemark. You might remember the film The Heroes of Telemark, starring Kirk Douglas as a most unconvincing Norwegian. Both the film and the book were based on the famous 1942 mission — a tale of great courage, skis and atoms. 

In the children’s novel the saboteurs are young teenagers and the foursome are sent to Scotland to be brutally trained in special ops by a peppery British colonel. The Norwegian youngsters are dropped on to the forbidding Hardanger Plateau and eventually blow up the plant, then escape over the freezing mountains into neutral Sweden with the Germans hot on their heels.