I have read and watched many things in regards to the Pacific and European theaters of WWII. I have never read anything in regards to the Middle Eastern theater. I thoroughly enjoyed learning about a theater that I had never looked into before.

I am a big fan of history. I am well read when it comes to WWII, both the European and Pacific theaters. Except for an odd article here or there, and the TV program 'Desert Rats', this would be my first comprehensive book on the Middle East theater.

This book has everything. Coded messages, easy access to most (all) embassies, spies and espionage, good luck and bad luck, errors, politics and blindness to the true nature of man. It was a great ride through the various campaigns and subterfuge. You will shake your head more than one. If you are a history buff, especially when itt comes to WWII, don't bypass this book.

Netgallery supplied me with this ARC in exchange for a review.

War of Shadows Review

I’m interested in WWII history and in Egypt so a book described as telling how the Allies drove the Nazis from the Middle East enticed me. I’m glad I picked it up because I really liked it.
The author is a journalist rather than an academic, so the writing is lighter and more focused on telling the story than analyzing it. However, the research appears to have been vigorous and the notes and citations copious. I also liked that the author stated up front that any conversations that appear in the book were “recorded by someone who took part in the conversation.”

The book itself focusses on the people - Allies, Mid Easterners, and Axis - who participated in the events. It gives the interesting backgrounds and pre-WWII histories of those people, discusses how the Allies and the Axis came to be able to break each other’s “unbreakable” codes, and focused on how the actions and errors of ordinary people moved events.

Highly recommended

My review of War of Shadows appeared on Ricochert.com on 24 January 2021 at:

https://ricochet.com/876260/reading-the-enemys-mail/

In England even before the second world war began, had created a group of crytographers whose job was to break the German and Italian codes used by diplomats and the military. This book concentrates on how the broken codes effected the war in North Africa. But we are not only privy to the broken Axis codes but to how the Germans and Italians used broken codes of the English and Americans.

Not all codes could be broke completely and therefore the information that was gained by the broken codes differed at times and would give on side or the other the advantage. The British know when Rommel is low on fuel and he knows where the British plan to ambush him. In the end it is the intercept of information that Rommel is making a dash for Cairo but is planning to use the captured British supplies after he destroys the British tank corps.

The most interesting to me of all the codebreakers was the Italians. They insinuated their people into all of the Allied Embassies, and then broke into them and stole the codebooks when the Embassy was empty at night and copied the codes and then put them back with no one the wiser.
The British also had a bad habit of sending cables in the clear or under easily broken codes that compromised everything they did or proposed to do.

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War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East by Gershom Gorenberg is a history book recounting the Nazi army’s march through Africa and Egypt. Mr. Gorenberg is a historian and journalist specializing in Middle East affairs

This is a World War II book recounting the battles between Erwin Rommel, the Dessert Fox, and the British, ending at the battle of El Alamein. The author tells the story through the eyes of the participants, without much conjecture, but with fascinating analysis. This is a history book about people and how their successes and failures changed history.

The battle for North Africa, at the time, had far reaching consequences. The might of the Nazi Army was on display, Mussolini’s Italian Empire was on the line, and of course control of the oil fields for the war in Europe. The Egyptians were promised to rule themselves if the Axis won, and that promise, worthless or not, had also its affects.

The book is dense, but mesmerizing. It requires attention from the reader but the author helpfully supplies a list of personnel in the front of the book if needed. If you are familiar with history of the Middle East after the battlefield moved to Europe you’d recognize how getting ready for a Nazi occupation shaped people and nations. For example, the Jews in Palestine took it upon themselves to train, as semi-professional army, or join the British forces, for defense against Rommel’s forces when they win Egypt and roll into Palestine. The Jews knew they were going to be massacred and wanted to put up a fight, the outcome would probably have been the same though. In 1948, however, the Jews had a disciplined, trained, and experienced soldiers and commanders. The rest is history.

The author mainly talks about events in Cairo and Bletchley Park, England focusing on failed spies and cryptographers. I enjoyed the center stage the cryptographers received (finally), and how their work, thankless and obscure for decades, had changed the outcome of the war. The author tells of the brilliance of humans, as well as the notion that no matter what, they are still the weakest link in the security chain and their mistakes cost dearly.

The book does a great job to taking a complex, and messy, narrative and shaping it for the reader to understand. It was amusing to read how an obscure, but genius, cryptographer working in a dank room had far reaching consequences on the other side of the world without anyone knowing about it. This is the history that I love to read, human stories with real consequences, unsung heroes who made a difference.

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East by Gershom Gorenberg is a fascinating read about a part of the war which doesn’t get as much attention. As a bonus, encryption, human intelligence, and signal intelligence have far reaching lessons which we should take to heart in today’s world of connected networks, which unfortunately it seem we haven’t learned much (in the humint category) since the late 1930s.

War of Shadows by Graham Goenberg reads a lot like a spy thriller written within the confines of a World War II history. So much ink has been spilled detailing seemingly every incident of the European portion of WW2 that the Middle East feels like an almost neglected front. In War of Shadows, Goenberg details the Middle Eastern spy network that allowed the Axis to stay one step ahead of Allied activities during WW2 and the Allies delayed efforts to break the spy network. Whomever wins the battle of spy craft wins the war.

One cannot however divorce the Middle Eastern theatre from the broader conflict as Goenberg moves with little effort from the Middle Eastern spy craft to broader decision-making by the big figures of the day including Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. It would be too easy to get bogged down in one story or the other, but Goenberg does a good job avoiding the trap for the most part. The pacing and the narrative structure is also really good in that nothing drags while allowing both stories to fit within one another.

A really interesting book about the battle for a lower priority region of World War II for historians.

If you're interested in WWII, and specifically, the North African Theater battles between the Desert Fox himself and British forces, this is a book for you.,

Gorenberg helpfully provides a listing of all the players at the front of the book, so if you're not intimately familiar with everything that was going on in the chaos of North Africa, you'll find that handy, The story, at its heart. is about people: their victories, but also their great failures. Both are abundant here - it is a war, after all.

It's a dense book, and requires attention. Here and there, it strays a little outside the lines (and it is clear the author is both very familiar with and very passionate about the period examined during these periods). However, it is a worthy read, an these occasional ramblings are worth it in the overall scheme of things.

Four and a half stars out of five, for the rambles, rounded up to five for a well-written and entertaining (as entertaining as war can be) book.

Thanks to Perseus Books/Public Affairs and NetGalley for the review copy.

War of Shadows is about the Middle East Theatre of World War II and the espionage/intelligence efforts that shaped it. The book primarily toggles between Cairo and Bletchley Park in England, the location of the English cryptographers, and features an enormous cast of historical figures (thank heavens for the list of dramatis personae at the front of the book). While there are some big names that take center stage, like the Desert Fox himself, the book is also full of failed spies, brilliant cryptanalysts, Egyptian politicians, a disputed count (yes, Almasy, the basis for The English Patient, makes an appearance), and more.

What I like most about the work is that it attacks the notion of a clear victory between right and wrong to show instead, as the book copy says, "a spiraling series of failures, accidents, and desperate triumphs." History traditionally tends to focus on moments of brilliance and "great men". This book is different. Enigma was certainly solved with some genius-level inspiration from the Polish mathematicians Rejewski, Zygalski, and Rozycki and Turing, but the secrets pried from those encoded messages were also the product of meticulous work on the part of the codebreakers and profoundly human mistakes from the Germans. The contrast between human intelligence and signals intelligence is fascinating. On the subject of mistakes, the running theme of Americans being unwilling to change their codes after being warned about them being cracked was certainly eye-opening.

The book gets bogged down a little, perhaps in part because of the effort to express the complexity and messiness, but a sincere tip-of-the-hat to the author for shaping a coherent story while retaining that messiness. I found myself having to consult the list of historical figures at the front of the book to remind myself who I was reading about. Still, an absolutely fascinating read about an important period of the war that gets rather less attention (at least in the American-geared media I generally consume). I highly recommend reading the epilogue and the acknowledgements section-- they wrap the book up nicely.

I enjoyed reading this book, it was great getting to know history that I really didn't know too much about.

A very interesting intersection—the Axis success and then failure in North Africa in World War II and the role espionage and code breaking played—is given a highly readable accounting. One problem—the account could have been more tightly focused, as the author took some very wide detours from a fascinating story. Nevertheless this was a compelling rendition of a key moment in World War II