Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring [Hardcover]

Gordon W. Prange (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1984

This is a hard cover book with a dust jacket. The jacket is in good condition with some wear to the edges and corners. The hard covers are in very good condition with little or no wear. The interior is free of any marks or writing. The binding is solid and fully intact. Published by McGraw-Hill Book Company in 1984.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 595 pages
• Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill; 1ST edition (October 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070506779
• ISBN-13: 978-0070506770
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #734,703 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterly documented., August 31, 2002

By 

Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring (Audio Cassette)

Model research work (61 reference pages) on the ploys of Stalin's master spy Richard Sorge.
Sorge penetrated the highest power circle in Japan and had excellent connections with the Nazi-party through the German Embassy in Tokyo.
Prange proves that Sorge informed Stalin about the German attack against the Soviet-Union (operation Barbarossa) and that Stalin didn't believe him. That Sorge pinpointed the Pearl Harbor attack is for the author a myth.
Sorge got caught by the Japanese when his spy work became careless. He hoped that Moscow would save him through an exchange of prisoners, but his friends let him fall as a burnt spy. He was hanged. Only twenty years later Moscow admitted that he was an agent of the Comintern.
Excellent portrait of Sorge: a desperate soldier of WWI, who saw in communism the salvation of humanity, but also a hard drinker and a compulsive womanizer. The definitie book on Sorge. I agree with one of the rewiewers that this work is essential historical reading about WWII.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why is this book out of print???, May 27, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring (Hardcover)

This is an excellent account of the Sorge spy ring that operated in Tokyo prior to and during WW II. Richard Sorge was an NKVD agent (predecessor to the KGB) who was sent to find out if Japan was going to attack the USSR.

His mission was a first rate success. He was able to tell Stalin that the Japanese militarists were going to attack to the south, against the East Indies, Philippines, and Australia. They would not attack Russia unless three things happened: the Germans captured Moscow, civil order broke down inside the USSR, and the Japanese Army had a significant force superiority along the Mongolian boder.

As a result of that information, Stalin pulled army divisions out of Siberia, and was able to use them for the counterattack outside Moscow in the Winter of 1941-2. That one piece of information could well have been the key to Hitler's defeat because if Moscow had fallen, the Germans probably would also have taken Stalingrad, and then captured the oil of the Middle East. Remember, the Luftwaffe didn't run out of airplanes; they ran out of fuel.

This book is an essential item for any historian of WW II.

4.0 out of 5 stars The famous Sorge Tokyo Spy Ring, February 11, 2012

By 

Dr. Frank Stech (Glenndale, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring (Hardcover)

Prange and his co-authors describe the origins and operations of the famous Sorge Ring in Tokyo, one of the USSR's best HUMINT sources on their Nazi enemies. Sorge and his comrades provided top quality strategic diplomatic intelligence on the Nazi's intentions, including their plans to invade the Soviet Union. Like all Prange's histories, well-researched and extremely well-written.