The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerillas, 1939-1945 - Softcover

Hastings, Sir Max

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062441566 ISBN 13: 9780062441560

Publisher: Harper Large Print, 2016

Synopsis

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

About this title

Review:

"Hastings (Catastrophe: 1914) further solidifies his gift for combining scholarship and readability in this scintillating overview of intelligence operations in WWII...Hastings tells it all in a book everyone interested in WWII should acquire."--Publishers Weekly

"Ambitious and often fascinating...This wide-ranging account is filled with compelling characters...A superb survey of an always interesting aspect of warfare."--Booklist

"[Hastings] brilliantly depicts the byzantine world of intelligence agencies, with dry humor and perception."--New York Review of Books

"[D]efinitive....This is a marvelous book - smart, carefully and exhaustively researched and highly informative. Even those exceptionally knowledgeable about World War II will find it extremely valuable. It is compelling and fascinating reading."--Christian Science Monitor

About the Author:

Sir Max Hastings chronicles Vietnam with the benefit of vivid personal memories: first of reporting in 1967-68 from the United States, where he encountered many of the war's decision-makers including President Lyndon Johnson, then of successive assignments in Indochina for newspapers and BBC TV: he rode a helicopter out of the US Saigon embassy compound during the 1975 final evacuation. He is the author of twenty-six books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, then editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes both for journalism and his books, of which the most recent are All Hell Let Loose, Catastrophe and The Secret War, best-sellers translated around the world. He has two grown-up children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife Penny in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Large Print
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0062441566
• ISBN 13: 9780062441560
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1232