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Reading Hitler's Mind
Most strongly associated with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, it is often stated that Britain’s policy of appeasement was instituted in the 1930s in the hope of avoiding war with Hitler’s Nazi Germany. At the time, appeasement was viewed by many as a popular and seemingly pragmatic policy. In this book the author sets out to show how appeasement was not a naïve attempt to secure a lasting peace by resolving German grievances, but a means of buying time for rearmament. By the middle of the 1930s, British policy was based on the presumption that the balance of power had already dramatically shifted in Germany’s favour. It was felt that Britain, chiefly for economic reasons, was unab...
Hitler's Air War in Spain
Almost since the advent of warfare, civilians have suffered ‘collateral damage’, but the concept of Total War – a war without limits – only surfaced in the early part of the twentieth century. The idea of huge numbers of aircraft raining death upon defenceless cities was seen by many as not only barbaric but, in practical terms, quite unrealistic given the logistical challenges that would have to be overcome in order to put them into practice. Any complacency over the threat, however, was rudely shattered on 26 February 1935, when Adolf Hitler officially signed a decree authorizing the formation of the Luftwaffe. The third branch of Germany’s armed forces erupted on to the European...
The Role of Intelligence in the Battle of Britain
This in-depth WWII history examines how the Battle of Britain was shaped by military intelligence on both sides of the conflict. In the summer and fall of 1940, the UK successfully fended off a relentless German attack from the air. While the Battle of Britain was essentially a war of attrition, it was critically influenced at every stage by the gathering, assessment, and reaction to intelligence. In this fascinating study, military historian Norman Ridley examines all aspects of German and British intelligence, from the accuracy of its data to the effectiveness of its deployment. Both the Luftwaffe and the RAF lacked detailed information about each other’s war production capacity. While t...
Hitler's British Nazis
Following the end of the First World War, many countries experienced economic decline. Unemployment, high inflation, low wages and poor working conditions led to widespread unrest. This manifested itself in the rise of powerful militaristic leaders, first in Italy where fascism was born, and then in Germany and elsewhere. The policies of the likes of Mussolini and Hitler were hugely popular, and fascism was seen by many as a viable political alternative to democracy. To some degree, these ideals also gained traction in the UK where some individuals in and among the elite of British society believed fascism was the way forward for the country. This is fully explored in Hitler’s British Nazi...
Hitler's Gold
War is a costly business and in 1939, Germany was almost broke with its economy overheating and heading for runaway inflation. Hitler needed hard foreign currency to pay for his war machine and the only way he could get this was by selling gold that he looted from the national banks of Austria, Czechoslovakia and all the countries that were occupied after September 1939. Another source of gold was the theft of personal gold especially from the Jews, most grotesquely, the haul of dental gold which came out of the concentration camps. No neutral country would accept Reichsmarks so the gold had to be laundered through Swiss banks. The story of Swiss complicity in German war crimes is still a su...
The Venlo Sting
"I would recommend the book to intelligence practitioners, scholars, and other persons interested in World War II intelligence history." —Michael Nady, American Intelligence Journal On 9 November 1939, two unsuspecting British agents of the Special Intelligence Services walked into a trap set by German Spymaster Reinhard Heydrich. Believing that they were meeting a dissident German general for talks about helping German military opposition to bring down Hitler and end the war, they were instead taken captive in the Dutch village of Venlo and whisked away to Germany for interrogation by the Gestapo. The incident was a huge embarrassment for the Dutch government and provided the Germans with...
Hitler's British Nazis
Following the end of the First World War, many countries experienced economic decline. Unemployment, high inflation, low wages and poor working conditions led to widespread unrest. This manifested itself in the rise of powerful militaristic leaders, first in Italy where fascism was born, and then in Germany and elsewhere. The policies of the likes of Mussolini and Hitler were hugely popular, and fascism was seen by many as a viable political alternative to democracy. To some degree, these ideals also gained traction in the UK where some individuals in and among the elite of British society believed fascism was the way forward for the country. This is fully explored in Hitler’s British Nazi...
Hitler and Poland
Following the end of the First World War, the newly reformed state of Poland was wedged uncomfortably between the two dominant nations of Germany and the Soviet Union. With their diametrically opposed political philosophies, both of Poland’s neighbours plotted continuously to reclaim its lands that had up until recently been part of the once great but now defunct German and Russian empires. In order to protect itself, Poland was obliged to plot and negotiate with both of its neighbours to try and prevent them from realising their ambitions to eviscerate the country. The United States had been instrumental in the creation of the Polish state after the First World War, Wilson in particular s...
The Road to Barbarossa
From the chaos of the First World War, during which Germany and Russia had fought each other to a standstill, there emerged two societies whose diametrically opposed ideologies of communism and fascism represented the opposite extremes of the political spectrum. Despite this, in time the governments and military establishments in both countries were able to create an environment where political expediency led to both cooperation and an eventual alliance. Western democracies found both systems repellent but the two countries, Germany and the Soviet Union, embodied vast resources of, in the case of the Soviets, raw materials and, in the case of Germany, huge intellectual, scientific and indust...
Military Air Power in Europe Preparing for War
The First World War had seen the mechanization of warfare. Battle fronts had become immobilized in the grip of machine-guns and heavy artillery, leading to slaughter on an unprecedented scale. The end of the war saw exhausted governments extricating themselves from the carnage, but some leaders were concerned that, sooner or later, another major war would follow. As France’s Marshal Foch put it, the Treaty of Versailles was only a ‘twenty-year truce’. The overriding concern was to find ways in future of avoiding the kind of static battle fronts that had consumed so many in such futile efforts. Military aviation was seen as the one great innovation that had the potential to do this by r...
