Product Description

Mystify. Mislead. Surprise. These have been the basic tenets of deception in warfare throughout human history. In WWII, however, the Allies employed unprecedented measures and practiced the most successful deception ever seen, meticulously feeding misinformation to Axis intelligence. Thaddeus Holt's ambitious and comprehensive book is the first to tell the full story behind these operations. Exactly how the Allies engaged in strategic deception has remained secret for decades. Now, with the help of newly declassified material, Holt reveals these secrets to the world in a riveting work of historical scholarship. THE DECEIVERS takes readers from the early British achievements in the Middle East and Europe at the beginning of the war, through to the massive Allied success of D-Day, American victory in the Pacific theatre, and the war's culmination on the brink of an invasion of Japan. Holt brings to life the hitherto little-known men, British and American, who ran Allied deception, tracks the development of deception techniques, and explores the groundbreaking work of double agents.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #263783 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1168 pages

Nicholas Rankin, THE TLS
''His fascinating account of its (allied military deception) triumph is unlikely to be bettered.'

Review
'This is a meticulous and measured book, an exemplary piece of scholarship... It has clearly been a large labour for Holt, but one of love. It will be sometime before anyone has anything to add.' (THE TIMES )

Michael Tillotson, THE TIMES
'A masterly history of deception operations'

Customer Reviews

A Phenomenal Achievement
'In wartime,' said Winston Churchill famously, 'truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.' 'The Deceivers' is a monumental work and clearly labour of love, which provides both its strength and its weakness. It is not the book for a reader seeking an introduction to the subject: this is a book for the serious scholar seeking detailed information, with a lengthy, minutely detailed record of virtually every deception operation carried out by the Allies, that could bewilder someone without a solid previous knowledge of the war. Fortunately for the casual reader, Mr Holt treats his subject with a lightness of touch that means it reads quite well as a novel, since one very interesting aspect of it is the attention to the personal details of the men and women behind deception operations.

Mr Holt has written a compelling account of an obscure and fascinating aspect of the war more closely related to show business than the brutal reality of killing. In what other military sphere could one hope to meet David Niven, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, magician Jasper Maskelyne, Peter Fleming (brother of Ian) and the strange writer, Dennis Wheatley? Because one purpose of deception is to beat the enemy with as little fighting as possible; to make him 'quite certain, very decisive, and wrong'. The hero of the story, if there is one, is an otherwise obscure colonel of Royal Artillery called Dudley Clarke. As Clarke wrote in the foreword to his unpublished memoirs, 'the secret war was waged rather to conserve than to destroy; the stakes were the lives of the frontline troops, and the organisation which fought it was able to count its gains from the number of casualties it could avert'. Here at last is just tribute to his efforts.

Rather Turgid
I have to say tha I learnt nothing about Second World War Deception , rather that this guy has a bit of a cob on sbout how Americans were percived by Brits and how they were shunned.

I think a better title would be 'How Amercians learnt to deceive in WWII'.Yes it is marvellously well sourced and you learn about the set up but not the dynamics nor the actions.

How on earth can a book purporting to be about deception, devote LESS THAN A PAGE to Major Jasper Maskerlyne?

Gave up at that point.