Derek Nudd's Blog - Posts Tagged "prisoner-of-war"

Interrogation in War and Conflict by Christopher Andrew

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


An interesting and useful review in thirteen separately authored chapters of the development and use of interrogation in the twentieth century. It covers both intelligence sought from servicemen, who were protected to some extent by the Hague and Geneva conventions, and from insurrectionists (or dissidents) who were not. More might have been made of this point.
In a surprising statement Christopher Andrew's introduction states that the WW2 Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) 'still awaits its historian'. Neitzel's Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations 1942-45 (2007) and Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWS (2011), and Fry's The M Room: Secret Listeners who Bugged the Nazis in WW2 (2012) all predate this book, and the good coverage elsewhere is the only excuse for omitting CSDIC's remarkable work from this account. Moreover Andrew repeats the frequent (but incorrect) assertion that the controversial London Cage was part of CSDIC - a surprising slip from an intelligence historian of his calibre.
Heather Jones' chapter on the development of interrogation techniques in WW1 is a valuable contribution to a topic which has received too little attention. Its main focus is on the military aspect in forward areas with a couple of pages on naval technical intelligence toward the end. As such I feel it misses one of the most significant developments: the joint service centre set up at Cromwell Gardens in 1917. As a central facility backed by a comprehensive filing system this was the essential template for CSDIC.
Much of the rest of the book covered areas where I am unqualified to comment, except to note the frequency with which the lessons, mistakes, and sometimes people from earlier conflicts pop up again.
I must however offer a final word for Simona Tobia's concluding review, which I thought excellent.
As a private buyer it took me a while to chase down a paperback copy of this at a halfway acceptable price. As for the hardback - Routledge, who are you kidding?



View all my reviews