Russia, Winston Churchill famously said on the eve of World War II, “is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”
In an illuminating, thoroughly researched new book, Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg provides a different kind of key to another mystery involving a different sort of Enigma, namely the Nazi system of codes that proved critical to their failure in the Middle East and their ultimate defeat.
In War of Shadows, Gorenberg unlocks a central mystery that befuddled military historians for decades: How was the famed Nazi field marshal Erwin Rommel able to steamroll British and Allied forces in North Africa for more than a year, reaching the brink of conquering Egypt and cracking the British Empire nearly in half, only to suffer an ignominious and consequential humiliation at El Alamein in July 1942 that began to turn the tide of the war?
