Race to the Moon traces the story of how America got to the moon before Communist Russia. The book opens with an appeal by President John F. Kennedy for winning the space race, then flashes back to World War II and traces the history of rocket development by the Germans, who were 25 years ahead of all other nations in rocket R&D. The book tells of feuds among Nazi leaders about who should control the rocket programme, the struggles of German space scientists to persuade Nazi leadership to invest in rocket research, and, finally, the hundreds of individual espionage efforts that went into smuggling information about this new technology out of the Reich and into the hands of British Intelligence.