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Gershom Gorenberg – WARS OF SHADOWS : Codebreakers, Spies, And The Secret Struggle To Drive The Nazis From The Middle East
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WARS OF SHADOWS : Codebreakers, Spies, And The Secret Struggle To Drive The Nazis From The Middle East

Gershom Gorenberg
WELL USED, HARDCOVER

RM25.00

A Story Of The Intelligence Aar In Middle East During World War II When The Nazis Were Trying To Gain Control Of The Region’s oil & Other Resources

Remarks Free Cover-Pages Wrapping
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ISBN 9781610396271
Book Condition WELL USED
Format HARDCOVER
Publisher PublicAffairs
Publication Date 19 January 2021
Pages 496
Weight 0.85 kg
Dimension 24.5 × 16.2 × 4.5 cm
Availability: 1 in stock

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“Wars of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East” is a 2021 book by Gershom Gorenberg. It tells the story of the intelligence war in the Middle East during World War II, when the Nazis were trying to gain control of the region’s oil and other resources. Wars of Shadows is a fascinating and important book. It tells a story that has been largely forgotten, and it sheds new light on one of the most critical theaters of World War II.
 
More than a half-century after the Allied victory in World War II, Normandy and Stalingrad tend to overshadow the people and events that gave the war its global reach.
 
But there were many other battlefields and modes of combat, one of which was the crucial intelligence campaign carried out by mostly forgotten men and women in the Middle East. That’s the story Gershom Gorenberg restores to memory and esteem in “War of Shadows,” a masterpiece of scholarship and synthesis that also reads like a thriller.


The book begins with the story of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, which was poised to take Cairo in 1942. The British were desperate for intelligence, and they turned to a group of codebreakers and spies who were working in the Middle East. These men and women, many of whom were Jewish, risked their lives to gather information about the Nazis.
 
Gorenberg tells the story of these spies in great detail, and he also provides a broader overview of the intelligence war in the Middle East. He shows how the Nazis were able to gain access to British intelligence, and he describes the efforts of the British and Americans to stop them.
 
In this World War II military history, Rommel’s army is a day from Cairo, a week from Tel Aviv, and the SS is ready for action. Espionage brought the Nazis this far, but espionage can stop them—if Washington wakes up to the danger.
 
The story opens in 1942, when the Axis appeared to be winning the war and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s army was so close to Cairo that the British General Headquarters was burning its archives. “The flames were too hot,” Gorenberg observes, “and half-burnt secrets floated out over the city.”
 
A young cipher clerk named June Watkins, serving in Britain’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, was armed with a revolver while she worked: “Among other things, they learned how to shoot themselves,” the author explains. “Women who knew the ciphers were not to fall into enemy hands.”
 
As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies’ plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942, he led his Axis army swiftly and terrifyingly toward Alexandria, with the goal of overrunning the entire Middle East. Each step was informed by detailed updates on British positions. The Nazis, somehow, had a source for the Allies’ greatest secrets.
 
Yet the Axis powers were not the only ones with intelligence. Brilliant Allied cryptographers worked relentlessly at Bletchley Park, breaking down the extraordinarily complex Nazi code Enigma. From decoded German messages, they discovered that the enemy had a wealth of inside information. On the brink of disaster, a fevered and high-stakes search for the source began.
 
War of Shadows is the cinematic story of the race for information in the North African theater of World War II, set against intrigues that spanned the Middle East. Years in the making, this book is a feat of historical research and storytelling, and a rethinking of the popular narrative of the war.
 
It portrays the conflict not as an inevitable clash of heroes and villains but a spiraling series of failures, accidents, and desperate triumphs that decided the fate of the Middle East and quite possibly the outcome of the war.
 
“War of Shadows” is based on meticulous and exhaustive research that ranged from “archives in places from Tel Aviv to Palo Alto to the homes of the children and grandchildren of people whose names have been forgotten though they changed the direction of history.”
 
Indeed, Gorenberg allows us to see that a Middle Eastern version of the Great Game was conducted in parallel with armed combat. Nazi plotters imagined that Egyptian dissidents could be persuaded to “switch to the German side.”
 
The same sentiment can be detected in the recollections of Anwar Sadat, then a young officer in an Egyptian artillery brigade that was serving with the British army in the campaign against Benito Mussolini’s expeditionary force. “Our enemy was primarily, if not solely, Great Britain,” Sadat later explained.
 
The code-breakers at Bletchley Park confirmed the strategic ambitions of the Axis in the Middle East. Bombers, fighters and transport planes were being sent from German-occupied Greece, “with Iraq markings or no markings at all,” for service against the Allies. After all, as Gorenberg points out, “both Iraq and the Vichy-ruled territories of Syria and Lebanon were fully aligned with the Axis.”
 
Palestine, then ruled by Britain under a mandate from the League of Nations, was also at stake. When Italian bombers attacked Haifa and Tel Aviv, the former grand mufti of Jerusalem sent his congratulations to Mussolini.
 
By contrast, the Jewish leadership in Palestine urged Jews to enlist in the British army, and an elite unit known as the Palmach shared its soldiers with the Special Operations Executive. Meir Yaari, a leader of the kibbutz movement, observed that “these days no fear is an exaggeration.”
 
Yet Gorenberg also notices that Moshe Shertok, a future prime minister of Israel, saw a distinction in the early years of the war between the Nazi invasion of Poland that had already happened and the Nazi invasion of Palestine that was feared in the future: “It’s possible that there will be atrocities here,” Shertok said. “On that,” Gorenberg writes in a heartbreaking aside, “intelligence was entirely lacking.”
 
One reason, as Gorenberg reveals, is that the spies and spymasters who made history were told, “Now history must have no memory of you.” Yet the book also flashes and sparkles with the kind of observed detail that we are accustomed to finding only in spy fiction.
 
Here are some of the key takeaways from the book:
● The Nazis were very close to winning the war in the Middle East.
● The British and Americans were able to turn the tide of the war thanks to the work of their spies and codebreakers.
● The intelligence war in the Middle East was a major factor in the Allied victory.
● The story of the spies and codebreakers in the Middle East is a story of courage, sacrifice, and triumph.
 
The highest praise that can be bestowed on his book is that it will remind readers of a cloak-and-dagger tale by John Le Carré with an armature of fascinating historical annotation. It is a well-researched and well-written book that is essential reading for anyone interested in World War II. It is a story that is both exciting and inspiring, and it is a reminder of the power of intelligence to shape the course of history.
 
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About the Author :
 
Gershom Gorenberg is a historian and journalist who has been covering Middle Eastern affairs for more than thirty-five years. His latest book, War of Shadows, began with a conversation in Jerusalem that set off years of searching through archives for long-secret documents, though attics for lost papers, through streets in Cairo, Rome, London—endless days and nights of seeing facts unravel and new ones take shape in place of them, of following one lead to another to find someone who remembered the mysterious woman at Bletchley Park who discovered Rommel’s source in British headquarters in Cairo—an obsessive hunt that led to the real story of how the Nazis came within an inch of conquering the Middle East.
 
Gorenberg was previously the author of three critically acclaimed books—The Unmaking of Israel, The Accidental Empire, and The End of Days—and coauthor of Shalom, Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin, winner of the National Jewish Book Award.
 
Gershom is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect. He has written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and in Hebrew for Haaretz. He will return to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 2021 to teach the workshop he created on writing history. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, journalist Myra Noveck. They have three children—Yehonatan, Yasmin and Shir-Raz.
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