The unseen war in Europe

About this book

"World War II was won by force of arms and superior resources, but there was another dimension: an unseen war of espionage and conspiracy. Prewar intelligence failures were responsible for Prime Minister Chamberlain's miscalculation at Munich, and British Intelligence lost virtually all of their agent networks in Europe when two senior officers were duped in a Nazi sting operation. But the British also had their breaks: Hitler strangely prevented his panzers from destroying the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk and made the fatal mistake of invading Russia. The British Intelligence triumph in breaking German ciphers--code-named Ultra--was decisive in winning the Battle of the Atlantic as well as in achieving other Allied victories, and the Double-Cross operation, in which captured German agents were made to feed the Germans misleading information as to the Allied landings, prevented catastrophe on D Day.^ The sweeping story gives a dramatic dimension to a brutal struggle that, more than a clash of arms, was often a contest of minds and an exercise in guile. There was the 'Canaris factor'--Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence, the Abwehr, served secretly as a patron of the German Resistance dedicated to ousting Hitler. The Unseen War in Europe also reveals how Canaris's group secretly enlisted Pope Pius XII as go-between with the British in its effort to overthrow Hitler and forestall a German invasion of Western Europe; how Canaris's deputy Hans Oster topped off the Western Allies as to Hitler's armies permission to cross Spain on their way to assault Gibraltar; and why saving Canaris's Abwehr from a takeover by the ambitious Reinhard Heydrich may have been an important motive for his assassination in a British-Czech commando operation.^ Then there was Operation Sunrise, in which OSS agent Allen Dulles in Bern brokered the surrender of German forces in Italy--to the dismay of Stalin, who feared an Allied double cross. The story's climax coincides with Canaris's torture and hanging as Schlossenberg prison."--Book jacket.