Charles Whiting (1926–2007)

The title belies the scope of the book, it not only narrates Monty's very late war thrust to seal off Denmark from the approaching Russians, it also discusses all the end of war activities, including the long and complex surrenders of the various German forces, including those on the Channel Islands, Texel off the Dutch coast and the "fortresses" such as Dunkirk that were held by the Germans till the end of the war as Eisenhower didn't think they were worth the time and effort to subdue. Highly recommended.… (meer)

After reading James Lucas' I moved to this one immediately.

First thing first - if you have read already any books on the Brandenburgers or Admiral Canaris and Abwehr this one won't give you much more insight.

It is rather short book but with hard focus on the German special forces - starting from Abwehr and then decline to SS/SD control and finally standard light infantry front-line duties. You wont find anything more then already told by James Lucas i.e. - although author does give a few unique perspectives, especially on Brandenburgers' actions in Egypt (Key to Rebecca anyone :))

Through the book author follows in parallel the career of Admiral Canaris - from starting the German special forces structure and assigning them missions to slowly falling out of grace with Hitler and Nazi establishment (and strange connection to Himmler) all the way to the ungraceful execution by the hands of Nazis in 1945 after he was tried as traitor of the state - and Otto Skorzeny - how he slowly took over the control of commandos from the Abwehr but ultimately ended up leading them as elite light infantry until he was taken prisoner in 1945 by the Allies.

Book does start with author meeting with Skorzeny after the war - but unfortunately this is where possible Skorzeny's direct contribution to the story stops. This is something that could have been used and developed more.

All in all good book, especially for somebody who is new to the subject. For those with more knowledge on the subject it wont nothing more except maybe some exciting first-hand stories like actions in Africa.… (meer)

A few weeks ago, I devoted quite some time to reading John Ferris' Behind the Enigma; the authorised history of GCHQ, which was at times a pretty savage amusement because of the author's highly detailed account of GCHQ and its predecessors, including the now-famous code-breaking station at Bletchley Park. Granted that that book covered the whole history of British code-breaking; but it consisted of some 850 closely-set pages in small type, and it took me nearly three weeks to get through it.

In contrast this book, on the German intelligence effort in World War II, has around 220 pages in larger type and with very generous margins. I read it in about two days. This should give a hint as to how much detail this book contains, which is in turn a consequence of the effectiveness of the German intelligence effort.

That effort was mainly down to one man, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, a somewhat eccentric character who was given the job of organising the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organisation, almost from scratch. The book concentrates on his story to bookend the narrative. In contrast to the British intelligence-gathering efforts, his achievements were few. The agents he attempted to place in Britain were all compromised, captured and either turned or executed. This was in almost equal parts due to a lack of insight in the planning stages of missions, incompetence and the heightened awareness of the British public and military.

This is not to say that German intelligence was totally ineffective: and this book explains why the Axis intelligence effort in Cairo was so effective - and that was because it was little to do with Canaris. Instead, Cairo was a hotbed of dissidents, Italian spies, disaffected Egyptian junior officers such as Gamal Abdul Nasser and Anwar Sadat, and an Anglophobic American military attaché who sent regular detailed accounts of British shortcomings to Washington using an outdated code that was one of the few codes the Germans had actually succeeded in breaking. The British knew that Cairo leaked like a sieve; Fitzroy Maclean makes regular reference to this in his memoir Eastern Approaches. When Canaris attempted to insert two agents into this mix, they were pretty quickly identified and neutralised.

Other German successes had little to do with Canaris, and indeed this book is bulked out with accounts of German intelligence activities in the USA - where there was a lot of support for Germany in the immediate pre-war years, resulting in many industrialists and politicians actively working for Germany and against Britain even after the entry of the USA into the war at the end of 1941 - and Switzerland, where Swiss collusion with Germany reached a point where the allies were seriously considering invasion in 1944.

The author paints the Swiss very unfavourably in this, though his analysis is quite one-sided. But as Swiss internal politics is little examined and written about outside Switzerland, this may be excused. Elsewhere, Whiting makes oblique critical references to the British establishment and some of its traditional support for Germany. Some of his other asides betray his political biases, but these are mostly superficial.

Canaris was fighting his war on two fronts; whilst the Allied intelligence networks were his opponents in espionage, his enemies were the German Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the separate intelligence service of Himmler's SS - an example of Hitler's belief in Social Darwinist struggle promoting the victory of the strongest. Canaris' failures counted against him, and he eventually fell as a consequence of his name being linked, albeit indirectly, with the 20th July assassination plotters.

The book is packaged almost as if it were a thriller novel; there is no index but there is a short bibliography which shows that Whiting did consult German-language sources, and indeed a lot of the book is based on personal interviews he made with some of the surviving protagonists. Some of these accounts have been accepted at face value, such as a comment that the Germans "broke" Claude Danzey's 'Z Organisation' in wartime Germany; but as this was mainly comprised of British visitors to pre-war Germany keeping their eyes open and reporting back snippets of information that MI6 assembled into a larger picture, this seems like some members of the German intelligence community talking up their activities against their own nationals and using Z as a straw man to justify their actions. The nature of the Z Organisation had long been acknowledged by British sources; Hinsley's official history of British intelligence in the war had been available for ten years when this book was written, and the pre-war nature of Z is made clear there. But Hinsley is not one of the sources Whiting consulted in his research.

Sub-editing is poor; there are two instances where the author is allowed to repeat himself, there is one mis-numbered footnote, and at least one parenthesis which is never closed. The book was first published in 2000, but the edition I read dates from 2021; as Whiting passed away in 2007, there can have been no author oversight of this new edition.

Overall, then, a very readable but basic account of its subject, which the more knowledgeable reader will have to supplement with other works.… (meer)