This is an interesting book. The most interesting section for me was a chapter by Gerhard L. Weinberg on the extent to which intelligence sources from World War II are available to scholars and the extent to which they are being utilized. In spite of the release of the Ultra information, Weinberg says that there are still areas where key information is still classified and others where information that is available hasn’t been used very well.

Russian archives are only sporadically open, and many Soviet documents as well as captured German documents are not available. For example, scholars have little evidence on when and if the Soviets were able to penetrate German codes. Some US/British archives are still classified. One area where a lot of information may still come out is in the area of German efforts to break Allied codes.

I’ve long suspected that the Germans were reading at least French and possibly British diplomatic and military codes to a considerable extent during the period between about 1936 and 1940. Hitler took a lot of gambles that worked out perfectly for him. Being able to read French codes or having highly placed spies could account for his ability to skate so confidently on such thin ice. Hopefully information to confirm or deny that will eventually be released.

Some of the information that has been released hasn’t been used as well as it could have been, according to Weinberg. Many historians have relied exclusively on Intelligence Summaries given to Allied leaders rather than on the decoded messages themselves. The problem with using the summaries is that in many cases important messages weren’t decoded until long after the intelligence summaries went out. If the information was no longer timely, code-breakers didn’t bother sending it on. At the same time, information in those messages gives key insights to historians who are willing to dig more deeply.

Weinberg makes one very important point. In 1941, the British and the US knew enough about the location of German submarines that they could route convoys around them. That meant that if he had chosen to do so, Roosevelt could have created more incidents between US ships and German submarines by deliberately routing US ships into the path of German subs. The fact that he didn’t casts doubt on theories that claim Roosevelt tried to provoke a war with Germany during that time period.

The book also has good chapters on the cold war and on German intelligence efforts before Hitler came to power. I came away from the book with one opinion firmly reinforced. As I’ve said several times in POD, we don’t have enough information yet to do good alternate history on the cold war yet. If we still don’t have vital information about World War II, how can we think we know what was going on behind the scenes in the early 1980s?