The Secret War
Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945
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4.1 • 56 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Monumental." --New York Times Book Review
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From one of the foremost historians of the period and the acclaimed author of Inferno and Catastrophe: 1914, The Secret War is a sweeping examination of one of the most important yet underexplored aspects of World War II—intelligence—showing how espionage successes and failures by the United States, Britain, Russia, Germany, and Japan influenced the course of the war and its final outcome.
Spies, codes, and guerrillas played unprecedentedly critical roles in the Second World War, exploited by every nation in the struggle to gain secret knowledge of its foes, and to sow havoc behind the fronts. In The Secret War, Max Hastings presents a worldwide cast of characters and some extraordinary sagas of intelligence and resistance, to create a new perspective on the greatest conflict in history.
But who really pulled the strings, and what secrets actually changed the course of the war?
The Spymasters and Their Agents: Meet the worldwide cast of characters, from spymasters like William Donovan and Stewart Menzies to notorious agents like Richard Sorge, Kim Philby, and the mysterious 'Cicero'.The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park: Go inside the secret world of Alan Turing and the codebreakers who battled to crack the German Enigma machine and unlock the vital 'Ultra' intelligence that shaped Allied strategy.A Global Espionage History: Examine the successes and failures of every major power's intelligence services—including Britain's MI6, America's OSS, Germany's Abwehr, and the Soviet NKVD—in an unprecedented global context.Guerrilla Warfare and Resistance: Discover the untold stories of partisans and resistance movements, and Hastings's unflinching assessment of how much these secret armies actually contributed to the final outcome of the war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hastings (Catastrophe: 1914) further solidifies his gift for combining scholarship and readability in this scintillating overview of intelligence operations in WWII. He moves through the large, highly specialized body of knowledge to share the whole story: machines and code books, agents and double agents, deceptions and illusions. Combining chronological and thematic approaches, Hastings makes a strong case that "it is impossible justly to attribute all credit for the success or blame for the failure of an operation to any single factor." Even the vaunted ULTRA system was part of a structure dependent on human skill, judgment, and intuition. Stalin's discounting of the barking "dogs in the night" the stream of accurate intelligence on Germany's intentions in 1941 brought the U.S.S.R. to the brink of catastrophe. In contrast, the U.S. victory at Midway owed much to Adm. Chester Nimitz accepting the word of radio intelligence that, still in its early stages, was "practically the only source" of reports in the Central Pacific. Hastings takes readers behind the lines with Britain's Special Operations Executive and describes parallel missions in such neutral states as Ireland and Portugal. He also provides character sketches of a number of clandestine agents. Hastings tells it all in a book everyone interested in WWII should acquire.
