The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945 [9780062259288]

Overview

"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.

This definitive global history of World War II intelligence reveals:

• Espionage and Counter-Espionage: A worldwide cast of characters from Britain’s MI6, America’s OSS, Germany’s Abwehr, and the Soviet NKVD engage in a high-stakes shadow war.
• The Codebreakers: The story of Bletchley Park, the monumental effort to crack the German Enigma cipher, and how Ultra intelligence shaped Allied strategy from the Battle of the Atlantic to D-Day.
• Legendary Spies and Agents: Follow the extraordinary sagas of real-life spies, including the infamous Cambridge Five, Tokyo-based master spy Richard Sorge, and the valet known as ‘Cicero’.
• Guerrilla Warfare and Resistance: An unflinching look at how partisans and resistance movements fought back, from the campaigns of the SOE to the vast and brutal Soviet partisan operations.
• Successes and Failures: A masterful analysis of how secret knowledge truly changed outcomes—and how pivotal blunders and overlooked intelligence could lead to disaster.