Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany

In this crackling tale, former British intelligence officer Annan offers an insider's view of the military espionage that helped the Allies win the war against Hitler. When working on the Joint Intelligence Staff at Whitehall from 1941 to 1945, Annan's job was to sift a torrent of documents, reports and intercepted messages, to monitor German troop movements and to predict Hitler's next move. He portrays Winston Churchill as bullying, bellicose, a poor strategist who would have always had his way had it not been for General Alan Brooke, chairman of the Chiefs of Staff--the only man to stand up to the prime minister and avert his potentially disastrous strategy proposals. Annan provides intimate details on preparation for D-Day, the Nazi invasion of Greece, the Allied bombing campaign and Stalin's disregard of confidential British warnings of an impending German invasion. At war's end, the author spent 18 months in Berlin on the governing British Control Commission. He vividly describes power struggles among the Allied forces occupying Germany, his work in guiding post-Nazi Germany toward multiparty democracy, his friendship with Konrad Adenauer and the Soviet Union's abortive campaign to amalgamate its puppet, the German Communist Party, with Germany's Social Democrats--a plot that, the Allies feared, might have led to a German-Soviet alliance. (Oct.)