Author:Robert Hutton
I’m not altogether sure how this ended up on my Kindle, but I’m glad it did.
The “Agent Jack” of the title was Eric Roberts, who ended up running the Fifth Column in Britain during WW2. An MI5 operative, his role was to network and find all the Nazi sympathizers – British or not – and gather intelligence on them, and stop their own intelligence-gathering efforts.
It’s very easily read – Hutton makes everything easy to understand, and paints portraits of all the key players that have a lot of insight. The book is based on a lot of information only released to the National Archive in the last 10 years or so, with Roberts only named latterly. There has been, I suspect, and awful lot of homework done for this book, and yet it is not overburdened with footnotes. Those present were strictly necessary.
It is, in a way, a book that might serve to puncture some of the myths that Britain likes to tell itself about home life during the war. At its peak, Roberts was running 500 agents, some of whom were very committed to the German cause and could have caused a great deal of harm – one, for example, knew of Bletchley Park…
Length of Read:Long
Might appeal to people who enjoyed…
Dominion by C J Sansom or SS-GB by Len Deighton.
Or anyone with an interest in WW2 MI5 work.
One thing you’ve learned
The last German war medal issued for WW2 was in fact issued by the UK government to a Nazi sympathizer.
I was sure I’d read this but it’s not on my Kindle. Must be another book on the same subject.
Vaguely relevant to secret WW2 fun and games…I was reading yesterday about a woman called Elizabeth Friedlander. She was a German Jewish graphic designer who fled the Nazis in 1938 and arrived in Britain with two portfolios and an 18th-century violin that had belonged to her mother. Four years later she was in charge of design at the Ministry of Information’s black propaganda unit, turning out forged Nazi ration books, identity papers, rubber stamps etc. After the war she did a lot of work for Penguin Books, including those lovely wallpapery Penguin Poets covers.
Agent Jack sounds a great read. Will see if there’s a hard copy.
Sounds like an interesting read. Does he mention Nazi sympathisers such as the Duke of Windsor, Wallis Simpson and Lord Halifax?
We now take it for granted that anti-Nazis such as Churchill would prevail, but it wasn’t so clear at the time.
Lord Rothermere and the Daily Mail, for example, were clearly pro-fascist with their “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” campaigns. Plus ca change …
It touches on some of them, including this fella, a virulent anti-semite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Strang,_1st_Baron_Strang