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© 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.

volume covers Cunningham’s headship of the British Admiralty Delegation inWashington from March to September 1942, his return to the Mediterraneanas naval commander of the Torch (1942), Sicily (1943) and Italy (1943) landings,and his role as First Sea Lord, from October 1943 until he retired fromactive service in June 1946. The last included the oversight of operationsfrom D-Day to the British Pacific Fleet, as well as the continuing battleagainst the submarines, a topic that is overly ignored in accounts of the Battleof the Atlantic, and the problems of transforming the navy to a peacetimeforce, a task Cunningham found depressing. The volume is based on Cun-ningham’s papers, deposited mainly in the British Library, the NationalMaritime Museum, the Churchill Archives Centre, and the Imperial WarMuseum, although other collections have also been utilized. This volumeoffers much for those working on strategy and the war, not least Cunningham’smeetings with Ernest King in Washington in 1942. Simpson argues that Kingwas not so much anti-British as ultra-nationalistic and wedded to the Americannavy. The return to operational duties was clearly more pleasant, although itmeant a return to dealing with difficult French leaders. Simpson discusseswhether Cunningham was over-cautious in hanging on to a major fleet todeal with possible Italian or Vichy capital-ship sorties, and concludes thatCunningham proved a strong prop to Eisenhower in the Torch operations,and that the use of naval power to prevent the Axis from doing a Dunkirk inTunisia was an important achievement. Axis troop losses were indeed formi-dable and this helped weaken the position of the Mussolini regime. As FirstSea Lord, there is coverage of a range of subjects, including disagreementswith Churchill, the ambivalent attitude toward Anvil/Dragoon, and the growingconcern with post-war matters, for example the future of Malta. In April 1944,the Sea Lords were discussing plans for a big heavy cruiser, new battleships andcarriers following in May. Post-war politics and realities were to lead to very dif-ferent priorities. Admiral Algernon Willis, Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean1946–8, wrote to Cunningham in 1946 about his optimism for a long-term,albeit smaller-scale, presence in Egypt, but that also was to go the way of thebig-gun navy.University of Exeter JEREMY BLACK

The Shadow War against Hitler: The Covert Operations of America’s WartimeSecret Intelligence Service. By Christof Mauch. Translated by Jeremiah Riemer.Columbia University Press. 2003. xii + 333pp. $36.50.

In the last few months of the Second World War, thousands of ordinaryGerman citizens and soldiers heard of an underground newspaper, Das NeueDeutschland, that encouraged resistance against the Nazis. What they did notknow was that the paper had been created and distributed by the Office ofStrategic Services (OSS), the American intelligence organization chargedwith fighting a covert war against Hitler’s Germany. It is stories such as thisthat have been brought to life by Christof Mauch in The Shadow War againstHitler. Mauch, the director of the German Historical Institute in Washington,D.C., and a professor of modern history at the Anglo-American Institute atCologne University, has produced a remarkably detailed examination of the

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© 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.

operations of the OSS against Nazi Germany. The book, ably translated byJeremiah Riemer, originally found life as Professor Mauch’s Habilitationsschriftand then, in a shorter version, as a book in German called Schattenkrieg gegenHitler.

What makes this study so compelling is the detailed portrait on offer. Mauchhas clearly done considerable work in a variety of archives, based not only inWashington but around the United States and in London. In essence, TheShadow War against Hitler follows a thematic approach in scrutinizing theefforts of American intelligence, first of the OSS’s forerunner, the Coordinatorof Information (COI), and then the OSS itself, in its efforts against NaziGermany. These labours included covert operations, such as the infiltration ofOSS agents into Germany, and black propaganda campaigns. While the formerhas long enjoyed a glamorous, almost swashbuckling, reputation courtesy ofHollywood and the idealized memories of participants, the latter is equallyinteresting. Mauch provides fascinating detail about the creation of phony radiostations, the introduction of German lyrics to American popular music, andeven the production of an ‘official’ Nazi sex education pamphlet designed tolower German morale by raising the spectre of reduced procreation levelsbecause of Allied bombing campaigns. The use of these methods by the OSSand the involvement of individuals such as Allen Dulles and William Caseyclearly have cold war echoes. Mauch does raise these comparisons at variouspoints, including the book’s conclusion, but more could have made of theselinkages.

The book also delves into the strategic analysis assembled by the OSSas projections were made about, among other things, German civilian andtroop morale levels and the effectiveness of the aforementioned Alliedbombing campaigns. In this section Mauch documents some of the tensionsbetween the Americans and British in terms of strategy, elements of whichRichard Aldrich has also examined in some of his work, and between themand the Russians.

Only when the book deals with domestic matters, in particular the sectionon the use of a German exile, Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, by the FranklinRoosevelt administration, does it make a wrong step. There is an entire book tobe written about the relationship between American domestic intelligence andGerman exiles and another German historian, Alexander Stephan, has done it.His Communazis: FBI Surveillance of German Emigre Writers, unfortunately notcited by Mauch, provides a detailed look at surveillance and would be an appro-priate companion to this volume.

Still, this quibble aside, The Shadow War against Hitler, with its not so faintechoes of the cold war covert intelligence war, is a well-researched and balancedstudy of the operations of the OSS against Nazi Germany. Mauch’s conclusionthat the efforts by the OSS against Nazi Germany, particularly its ‘exaggerationsand misestimates of German strength’, ‘ended up exerting greater influence onthe institutional development of American secret intelligence than the manyrealistic and differentiated assessments made about the strength of the ThirdReich’s military, economy, and morale’ (p. 219) is worth remembering in thecontext of today’s war against terror being waged by intelligence agencies aroundthe world.University of Birmingham STEVE HEWITT