Moonlight Sonata de JJ Baro

Moonlight Sonata
by JJ Baro

Moonlight Sonata, the aerial battle that could change the map of Europe

Now that the world is suffering the most devastating war of the 21st century, the keys to one of the cruelest and most controversial bombings that shook Europe during World War II come to light.

In 1940, German aviation devastated the epicenter of the United Kingdom’s arms industry, causing hundreds of victims and the loss of the British Army’s largest war supply. Could Winston Churchill have prevented it? Did the prime minister know the name of the city that was going to be bombed? Did he sacrifice her to hide that he had the key to the Nazis’ Enigma codes?

This is the central axis of Moonlight Sonatathe debut work of the Malaga lawyer and novelist Juan José Baro, presented this March, in the Decano Andrés Oliva room of the Illustrious Malaga Bar Association, on Paseo de la Farola 13 in Malaga.

Conspiracy theories or historical evidence? Why would the British Prime Minister have ruled out evacuating the city that was going to be razed? War strategy or sacrifice for the common good? JJ Baro’s novel reveals the mysteries of a battle that changed the concept of aerial warfare.

Operation Moonlight Sonata—named by the Germans in reference to a work by composer Ludwig van Beethoven—dropped 150,000 incendiary bombs that destroyed all factories and more than 4,000 homes. Hundreds of people lost their lives and the injured numbered in the thousands. Moonlight Sonata was the cruelest of the air raids of the so-called “Battle of Britain.” Could it have been avoided? At what price?

This novel speaks of a race against time, that of Winston Churchill and his army of cryptanalysts to decipher the Nazis’ Enigma codes and neutralize their advanced air navigation technology; and also, of the German desire to obtain a decisive victory that would surpass the turning point and definitively tilt the balance of the contest towards their side.

All of this, punctuated with the intervention in occupied France of the SOE spies – the special operations corps created by the British Prime Minister and MI6 with the intention of “setting Europe on fire” – and with the common thread that provides the secret diary of an exceptional protagonist: Dr. RV Jones; British scientist who led what was known as the “Battle of the Beams”, the largest electronic warfare operation to date.

The historical novel by JJ.Baro, whose presentation ceremony included the introduction of the surgeon and writer, Manuel Ruiz Roldán, and the representative of Culture of the Illustrious Bar Association of Málaga, Lucía Alcalá, immerses the reader in the turbulent Europe of the Second World War and the conflicts that shaped the map of a continent devastated by war.

Sobre JJ.Baro:

Lawyer for more than twenty-five years. Founder, among others, of the firms Gentius Abogados and Bedlam Sports Law, has developed his professional career in the areas of sports law, corporate law and urban planning.

For the preparation of this novel, JJ. Baro has consulted various English military and historical archives, including those of the Admiralty. And he has delved into a good number of biographies, both official and authorized and unauthorized, of Prime Minister W. Churchill, as well as his own memoirs and testimonies of direct protagonists, either in the form of diaries, monographs and testimonies. In addition to extensive documentation on the process of deciphering the Enigma codes, the advances and countermeasures carried out by the British against the Luftwaffe, German aviation, and the sabotage operations carried out by the SOE in France during World War II. .