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A review by firstwords
Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945 by Leo Marks
4.0
This is the story of a man who came from a family of booksellers, who cracked his first code at age 8, and ended up working for one of several British intelligence/counterintelligence organizations during WWII. It is both a look into the very real, James-Bond-esque (the author of those novels worked for a "rival" intel org) world of spies and assassination, as well as the fumbling bureaucracy of a national government. How do things like spy rings operate when you have to fill out forms in triplicate?
If that sounds boring, it's not. This is all real-world stuff. You will see how poor decisions back home led to the death of agents (to include being sent to concentration camps), as well as how agents were willingly sacrificed as the result of *good* decisions. There are also several tales in the book of agents who knew they were going to give their lives, entire teams, for objectives as seemingly unimportant as a power plant or storage facility.
This last, to me, conveyed the seriousness of the Nazi/Axis threat, when men and women (and there were a LOT of female intelligence operatives, I'd say the numbers were about even in this story) were willing to sacrifice themselves and their friends for something as "trivial" to us modern readers as a railway station or shipment of ammunition.
Mr. Marks was also a code creator, and was responsible in large part (as far as creating the code goes, not for logistics) for the silk code sheets that Allied forces carried for radio communications during the invasion of Normandy. You can actually see a representation of this in the film Saving Private Ryan. Those would be Mr. Marks' silks.
In addition to his own story, Marks recounts going to a "lab" of sort where gadgets that you think only existed in James Bond really came to be (again, the author of those books simply lifted ideas for what was actually used). They took various animal dung, real, and made fiberglass molds out of it for intelligence drops. Codes were sewn into clothing. Radios were hidden in literally everything that could fit them. Tailors from occupied countries were put to work forging their own clothes, so that they would fit in, labels were smuggled out (just labels!) to make the clothing authentic...ever see a current-day German tourist in America? They're allllllmost fitting in, but something is a bit different. Those tiny "hmms" would set off the local Axis counter-intel rings and local law enforcement. Maybe the cut of the shirt is a bit different, or the placement of the back pocket on the jeans is off.
Anyway, very interesting read, and long. There is a lot of loss in this book (Mr. Marks works with people whose average life expectancy was 6 weeks once put in the field), and it is presented very matter-of-fact. Very enjoyable.
If that sounds boring, it's not. This is all real-world stuff. You will see how poor decisions back home led to the death of agents (to include being sent to concentration camps), as well as how agents were willingly sacrificed as the result of *good* decisions. There are also several tales in the book of agents who knew they were going to give their lives, entire teams, for objectives as seemingly unimportant as a power plant or storage facility.
This last, to me, conveyed the seriousness of the Nazi/Axis threat, when men and women (and there were a LOT of female intelligence operatives, I'd say the numbers were about even in this story) were willing to sacrifice themselves and their friends for something as "trivial" to us modern readers as a railway station or shipment of ammunition.
Mr. Marks was also a code creator, and was responsible in large part (as far as creating the code goes, not for logistics) for the silk code sheets that Allied forces carried for radio communications during the invasion of Normandy. You can actually see a representation of this in the film Saving Private Ryan. Those would be Mr. Marks' silks.
In addition to his own story, Marks recounts going to a "lab" of sort where gadgets that you think only existed in James Bond really came to be (again, the author of those books simply lifted ideas for what was actually used). They took various animal dung, real, and made fiberglass molds out of it for intelligence drops. Codes were sewn into clothing. Radios were hidden in literally everything that could fit them. Tailors from occupied countries were put to work forging their own clothes, so that they would fit in, labels were smuggled out (just labels!) to make the clothing authentic...ever see a current-day German tourist in America? They're allllllmost fitting in, but something is a bit different. Those tiny "hmms" would set off the local Axis counter-intel rings and local law enforcement. Maybe the cut of the shirt is a bit different, or the placement of the back pocket on the jeans is off.
Anyway, very interesting read, and long. There is a lot of loss in this book (Mr. Marks works with people whose average life expectancy was 6 weeks once put in the field), and it is presented very matter-of-fact. Very enjoyable.