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A review by stevienlcf
Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre
3.0
Macintyre's latest WWII book details Operation Fortitude -- how the British bamboozled the Germans into believing that the D-Day invasion would take place not in Normandy but in the Pas de Calais, far away to the northeast, where a fictitious “First United States Army Group,” led by a boozy actor impersonating General Montgomery, would land. The main quintet of double agents comprised “a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming.” Together they, and their British handlers (an equally eccentric cast of Wodehousian and Waughian characters) would save thousands of lives.
Macintyre writes of the madcap exploits of these double agents: One enjoyed a lavish lifestyle draining $86,000 in less than 9 months and requiring a steady stream of chocolates and nylons for gifts for his many lovers, and another demanded a navy sub to fetch a beloved quarantined pooch. While the details of the personal lives of this group of double agents are entertaining, and the quirkier aspects of the story are remarkable (the British diverted over $4.5 million that the Germans believed were financing its espionage activivities in the UK, so that Double Cross was a self-financing and profitable system) Macintyre does not adequately explain how the Germans could be so easily duped by a ragtag group of agents, suggesting that they were just too humorless, too German, to see the joke being played on them. Having read Double Cross, one expects that the German military was led by Colonel Klink.
Macintyre writes of the madcap exploits of these double agents: One enjoyed a lavish lifestyle draining $86,000 in less than 9 months and requiring a steady stream of chocolates and nylons for gifts for his many lovers, and another demanded a navy sub to fetch a beloved quarantined pooch. While the details of the personal lives of this group of double agents are entertaining, and the quirkier aspects of the story are remarkable (the British diverted over $4.5 million that the Germans believed were financing its espionage activivities in the UK, so that Double Cross was a self-financing and profitable system) Macintyre does not adequately explain how the Germans could be so easily duped by a ragtag group of agents, suggesting that they were just too humorless, too German, to see the joke being played on them. Having read Double Cross, one expects that the German military was led by Colonel Klink.