Deutschlands Araberpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg by Heinz TillmannReview by: Harold J. Gordon, Jr.The American Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1 (Oct., 1967), pp. 103-104Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1849047 .

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General 103 based, this is not helpful, leaving the reader with the impression that the sources have been used uncritically. Lack of credibility is the vice of all books I have read on espionage and intelligence, and Farago does not escape it. Authors tend to claim too much for the value of the intelligence coups they report, as Farago, for example, does in his account of Herbert 0. Yardley's contribution to the Washington Conference, and they seldom succeed in relating the intelli- gence acquired to the formulation of national policy.

Farago only confuses the issue by trying to combine a political history of the origins of the Pacific War with his account of the intelligence operations that preceded it. Although he disclaims the purpose, it remains with him and gives rise to some questionable dicta. The jacket claims are, as usual, outrageous. There are no "astounding revelations." Farago has used the later Japanese memoirs and interrogations, unavailable at the time of the Pearl Harbor investi- gation, to fill out many interesting bits of the record, and his climactic account of intelligence in the tight hours of December 6 and 7 is perhaps more clearly detailed than some others, but it is hardly sensational. He has amassed consider- able information not generally well known, and he will doubtless have to be consulted, with caution, by historians of the Pacific War and its origins. But a sober history of intelligence in the pre-Pearl Harbor era remains to be written. New York, New York WALTER MILLIS

DEUTSCHLANDS ARABERPOLITIK IM ZWETTEN WELTKRIEG. By Heinz Tillmann. rSchriftenreihe des Instituts fur Allgemeine Geschichte an der Martin-Luther-Universitiit Halle-Wittenberg, Number 2.1 (Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. T965. PP. 473.)

PROFESsoR Tillmann provides a survey of Germany's policy toward the Arab states and colonial areas from the eve of World War II until the fall of Tunisia, when Germany lost all direct touch with them and the Axis was clearly on the defensive on all fronts. The emphasis is upon the states of Asia Minor and the Arabian Peninsula, with Turkey and Iran thrown in with the actual Arab states for good measure.

The author has worked diligently through the literature and the unpublished diplomatic materials to be found in both portions of Germany. He was particu- larly successful in supplementing materials in the Foreign Office Archive in Bonn with others found in the Potsdam-Merseburg Archives, demonstrating again that these materials form a single unit, the dispersion of which greatly reduces the value of both collections.

Unfortunately, the Stalinist-Marxist approach to history has destroyed most of the value of this book and made it far less readable than it should be. The author makes it clear that his book was written primarily to discredit the West Germans, whom he sees as the fitting heirs of Nazi Germany, in the Arab world by showing that the Nazis were really no more friends of the Arabs than were the British and French. In order to support this thesis, Tillmann often goes be- yond the evidence he presents. He has a habit of making a broad accusation against either Germany or the Western Allies in the first half of a sentence. He

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104 Reviews of Books

then ties this statement to a carefully documented quotation in the second portion, which lends some verisimilitude to his allegation. He also throws in quotations from general Marxist-Stalinist histories to support such general accusations. The result is that one wonders about the manner in which he selected and used his evidence. In essence, he has seriously weakened, if not destroyed, the basic value of a work that could have been a worthwhile addition to our knowledge of German policy in the Second World War.

The polemical aim and nature of the book also distort its perspective. Nazi plans regarding the Near East and North Africa are moved from the wings to center stage, although to do this the suggestions and proposals of individual diplomats in distant outposts have to be presented as representing German policy, and casual, typically grandiose remarks of leading Nazis are construed to be serious policy proposals. This distortion also applies to his presentation of the Allies and their plans. Thus, he inflates the vague and semicomic French pro- posals of 1940 for bombing missions in the Caucasus into serious plans for a large-scale campaign against Russia based on the Near East, and he interprets appeasement and the Sitzkrieg exclusively in terms of Allied desires to incite the Germans to attack the Soviet Union.

The style of the book also suffers seriously from its political connections and from repetition. The jargon of political Communism is seriously over- worked, so that the reader is tempted to count the number of times such words as "Imperialist aggressors" or "faschistischen Achsenmichte" are used. The foot- notes consist of numbers keyed to the bibliography to the sorrow of the serious reader. In short, on all fronts, this work is a sad example of how Clio suffers when harnessed to a political chariot. University of Massachusetts HAROLD J. GORDON, JR.

BATTLES LOST AND WON: GREAT CAMPAIGNS OF WORLD WAR II. By Hanson Baldwin. (New York: Harper and Row. I966. PP. xi, 532. $IO.OO.)

ELEVEN major battles of World War II, as described and analyzed by the dis- tinguished military editor of the New York Times, are included in this vast "cross-section of the world's greatest war." Not all of these battles were decisive in the full sense of that word, but most were pivotal or else hold some other unique or dramatic attraction for the military historian. There is something for every interest: land campaigns (Poland, Stalingrad, the Bulge); amphibious as- saults (Sicily, Tarawa, Normandy); a combination (Bataan-Corregidor); aerial struggles (the Battle of Britain); air-sea fights (Leyte Gulf and the prelude to Okinawa); and an airborne invasion (Crete). While several of these accounts have appeared in print before, they have been revised or expanded for publica- tion in this volume.

Baldwin's audience is the general reader, and for him he writes with verve, drama, and an eye for colorful detail. For the scholar he includes solid docu- mentation, useful bibliographies, and lengthy comments on controversial or elusive points. His descriptions are accurate and thoughtful, based largely on

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