THE DECEIVERS: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War

This colossal and valuable study is clearly a labor of love for Holt, a lawyer and former deputy secretary of the army. It chronicles in thorough detail and smooth prose various operations that the Allies conducted to mislead the Axis as to the time, place, strength and direction of a host of military operations. The foremost of those was, of course, D-Day, and the origins, conduct and imposing logistics of Operation Fortitude are laid out in unsurpassed detail. So are a host of smaller operations, such as Operation Mincemeat, the subject of the book The Man Who Never Was . The men and women behind the planning and execution included the British career soldier Brig. Dudley W. Clarke; Gordon Merrick, later the author of The Lord Won't Mind and its successors, one of the first mainstream successes in gay fiction; and actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who was an amateur sailor and leader of a fine decoy effort in southern France. The achievements of the deceivers were invaluable if not always decisive. Few of them have been chronicled this completely or this well, at least for American readers, in a volume that reads with the fluency of a thriller for any reader with a minimal knowledge of and interest in the war. Agent, Phyllis Westburg. (June 6)