Customer Reviews

Top Secret Tales of World War II

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None are top secret and some are inaccurate. This is a collection of short squibbs of just about everything you have already read about WW2. And in some cases author Breuer just gets its wrong: German magnetic mines, for example, were NOT as he says magnetic in the sense of being drawn the metallic mass of a nearby boat where they exploded on contact, but rather stationary and tethered and set off by the passing of a nearby magnetic field (when they worked, that is, which wasn't often). Worse, perhaps, the writing is on par with a 6th grader: one small section (the two pages of magnetic mines) calls these things "fiendish devices" and "infernal devices" within paragraphs. If you want to read good non-fiction on war, dump this and turn to John Keegan!

This work is a mildly interesting collection of semi-familiar "tales." It is so poorly written that it reads like a first draft. Where was the editor?

Like so many of Breuer's other 'books,' this is what amounts to a collection of press clippings, often inaccurate, always repetitive, never informative, occasionally contradictory, invariably poorly written and generally dull. No reader with the most rudimentary knowledge of the European Theater of WWII could be unfamiliar with any of this, and most of them would have done a far better job of compiling these short chapters and jamming them between two covers.

The Roehm purge was 'one of the bloodiest purges that European history had ever known' (about 1000 dead is a lot, but European history is replete with far, far greater massacres); the population of pre-war Germany is quoted at 80 million and at 90 million within 5 pages of one another; "Mynheer" is a Dutch title, not a Christian name as repeatedly asserted regarding the proprietor of the Hotel du Levrier in Maastricht; "Herrenvolk" does NOT directly translate to "German people;" the German garrison in Denmark was only the tiniest fraction of Breuer's quote of 200,000 (!!!); etc etc et multiple cetera. Breuer's prose, to add to the torture, is so awful one wonders who if anyone edited the ms; we are told of "dark, stormy" nights (really!), "booted legions" (did the Allies troops wear sandals?), "fiendish" plots (no doubt Fu Manchu behind them), and the like. Please.

This stuff is awful. Buy any other book on WWII and be glad you dodged this bullet.

These are fun and often interesting tales of World War 2, although where the fact ends and the fiction begins is often hard to tell. Many - indeed most - of the two-to-three page vignettes offer as a source, in addition to articles, books, and interviews, something called 'Author's Archives,' prompting the question: if the source material didn't come from anything written or spoken, where did it come from? Indeed, I consulted one of the cited works for one of the tales and found very little resemblance between the two accounts. Still, Breuer is a good story-teller, so if you're not too fussy about factual exactitude, you might enjoy this book.

I found this book very interesting and highly entertaining, not boring at all. Written in short stories, I couldn't put it aside. Great book.