Summary of Gershom Gorenberg's War of Shadows

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 On September 3, 1939, Neville Chamberlain delivered a radio speech that announced Britain was at war with Germany. The children of London and the rest of Britain’s cities were lined up on the platforms of railway stations and boarding trains for the countryside, where they would live with strangers.

#2 On the evening of September 3, the train carrying Adolf Hitler’s headquarters left Berlin. It was the mobile headquarters of Hitler, with a special security battalion traveling with him. Hitler was extremely taken with the forty-seven-year-old officer.

#3 The United States remained resolutely unready for war. The country’s best-known isolationist, aviator Charles Lindbergh, gave a national radio broadcast to rally opposition to the repeal of the Neutrality Act.

#4 The meeting was held the next week with Heydrich, and the week after. Hitler had approved more detailed plans. In the short term, Jews would be consigned to ghettos until they could be expelled. There would be three categories of Poles in the annexed territories: political leaders, to be put in concentration camps; mid-level Poles, to be deported immediately; and all the rest, who would first be exploited as laborers, then pushed eastward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822533882

IRB Media

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Insights on Gershom Gorenberg's War of Shadows

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

On September 3, 1939, Neville Chamberlain delivered a radio speech that announced Britain was at war with Germany. The children of London and the rest of Britain’s cities were lined up on the platforms of railway stations and boarding trains for the countryside, where they would live with strangers.

#2

On the evening of September 3, the train carrying Adolf Hitler’s headquarters left Berlin. It was the mobile headquarters of Hitler, with a special security battalion traveling with him. Hitler was extremely taken with the forty-seven-year-old officer.

#3

The United States remained resolutely unready for war. The country’s best-known isolationist, aviator Charles Lindbergh, gave a national radio broadcast to rally opposition to the repeal of the Neutrality Act.

#4

The meeting was held the next week with Heydrich, and the week after. Hitler had approved more detailed plans. In the short term, Jews would be consigned to ghettos until they could be expelled. There would be three categories of Poles in the annexed territories: political leaders, to be put in concentration camps; mid-level Poles, to be deported immediately; and all the rest, who would first be exploited as laborers, then pushed eastward.

#5

The test of the codebreaker is to send a message that can only be read by the person it’s intended for. One solution is to replace each word with something else, such as a random group of five letters or numbers.

#6

The most common letter in English is e. If replaced by z, then z will be the most common letter in the enciphered message. The simplest way to protect a code is to make the groups look different each time.

#7

The new era of telegraph and radio made the need for a convenient but unbreakable code much more pressing, for businesses as well as governments. Messages sent by Morse code in electrical pulses could be easily read by the wrong people.

#8

The German military upgraded Enigma in a way that upped the possible settings into the quintillions. This was a small number compared to the total possible ways to wire three different wheels. Rejewski solved the puzzle of the wiring by January 1933.

#9

Ralph Bagnold was a lieutenant in the British Troops in Egypt. He was bored with his life in Cairo, so he bought a Model T and started exploring the desert. He fell in love with the silence of the desert night and the secret joy of changing a broken spring with his own grease-covered hands.

#10

The Libyan Desert was discovered by two Egyptian princes, Kemal el Din and Ahmed Hassanein, who led a camel expedition from the Mediterranean to a Libyan oasis called Kufra. They came to a mountain called Uweinat, half-mythical until then, a mass of sandstone that looked like some crumbling citadel.

#11

Bagnold was a