World War Deception

“A riveting tale told through personal accounts and sketches along the way—ultimately, a story of success against great odds. I enjoyed it enormously.” —Tom Brokaw The first book to tell the full story of how a traveling road show of artists wielding imagination, paint, and bravado saved...

Among the operations known as Plan Bodyguard, the deception devised to cover the Allies’ Normandy landing, was the little known but critical Plan Zeppelin, the largest and most complex of the Bodyguard plans. Zeppelin, in conjunction with the Mediterranean Strategy, succeeded in pinning down sixty German divisions from southern France to the Balkans in time for D-Day. This was the work of “A” Force, Britain’s only military organization tasked with carrying out both strategic and tactical deception in World War II.

Most of the great military campaigns and breakthroughs of World War II would not have been successful without the efforts of teams of people working unsung and undercover. The codebreakers of Bletchley Park cracked codes that allowed for the interception and exploitation of German intelligence but many took the secret of their wartime activities to the grave. Others put their lives on the line to gather information for their countries, infiltrating other nations' secrets at great personal risk.

This instant New York Times bestselling “dynamic detective story” (The New York Times) reveals the hidden history Rudolf Diesel, one of the world’s greatest inventors, and his mysterious disappearance on the eve of World War I. September 29, 1913: the steamship Dresden is halfway between...

"A" Force explores an area of World War II deception history that has often been neglected. While older studies have focused on the D-day deception campaign and Britain's infamous double-agents, this work explores the origins of Britain's deception activities to reveal how the British became such masterful deceivers. This is the first work to focus exclusively on "A" Force and the origins of British deception, examining how and why the British first employed deception in World War II. More

The unbelievable true story of the American soldiers who used inflatable tanks and fake radio broadcasts as weapons in World War II. Right around D-Day of World War II, a small, unarmed American army unit deployed to Nazi-occupied France. Instead of artillery, this unit fought with stagecraft...

In the summer of 1929, Weimar Germany's secret military agreement in the 1920s with the USSR to evade the Versailles Treaty and develop new weapon systems beyond the Ural Mountains is about to bear fruit. Aided by a shadowy international conspiracy of arms dealers, industrialists, and financiers, both countries are poised to dismember the newly independent Poland created in the aftermath of the Great War. To distract Britain from helping the Poles and risking a new world war, the conspiracy intends to foment a coup d'etat in the Irish Free State.

Prague, 1943. Taken from her home in Prague, Hana Lederova finds herself imprisoned in the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt, where she is forced to endure appalling deprivation and the imminent threat of transportation to the east. When she attracts the attention of the Czech gendarme who becomes her guard, Hana reluctantly accepts his advances, hoping for the protection she so desperately needs. Sydney, 2010. Manipulated into a liaison with her married boss, Tessa knows she needs to end it, but how?

It is 1943 in occupied Belgium, where the clash between patriots of the Resistance and traitors collaborating with the Nazis set neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, and it was impossible to know who to trust. An American aviator shot down over Belgium is rescued by a young Belgian woman who is an operative of a clandestine escape organization. Their treacherous year-long journey is an odyssey of intrigue and deception, eventually uncovering a monstrous Nazi plot that could threaten civilization long after the end of the war.

Mahl's account brings together bits and pieces of a story that has been told before together with the best research and documentation of the subject available on this crucial period of Western history between 1939 and 1944.

Before Ian Fleming there was Dennis Wheatley. A best-selling spy novelist at the outset of World War II, Wheatley became a master of deception for Great Britain, turning pulp fiction fantasies into real-life espionage. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tina Rosenberg tells the amazing true story of one man who applied the plots of his own novels to the battlefield - and changed the course of history.