Book Review: Spies, Code Breakers, and Secret Agents

Spies, Code Breakers, and Secret Agents: A World War II Book for Kids by Carole Roman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a wonderful book that, while primarily written for kids, can be enjoyed as well by adults. Written in a clear, concise voice, it begins, as does the war, in September 1939 by describing the countries and forces involved, discusses how the war evolved, defines the role spies played, and reveals the identities of some of the most famous spies, double agents, and code breakers of World War II. Now, I ask you: who could put a book like this down?!

But is isn’t just the war in Europe that the book discusses; also described, in the same manner, is the war in the Pacific and what pushed Japan to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As was the case in Europe, spies in the Pacific were yet another threat with which the US had to contend.

But what really piqued my interest was the material on spies in the US. Yes, right in the good ole US of A. It may be hard to believe, but there were some among our population who were sympathetic to the Nazi cause . . . American citizens, perhaps, with German heritages? I remember my mother telling me about the time in 1940 when I was an infant and the three of us—my father, she, and I—were traveling by car from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin to Milwaukee to visit her mother. We had stopped at a roadhouse along Highway 41. Inside, all the men were dressed in Nazi uniforms. Needless to say, we left immediately. Were some of those men immigrants who came to the US after World War I and now were spies?

As an adult, in researching material for a short story I was writing, I came across an article about how the Nazi’s landed spies on our East Coast, dropping them off from a submarine. So, yes, even on the US East Coast, we had to contend with spies.

But it just wasn’t the Nazis who had spies in the US. As the book tells us, even our allies had spies in the US. For example, Britain had spies in Washington for the purpose of influencing our country to join the Allied Forces and fight Nazi Germany.

One way to defeat spies, of course, is to encode messages. As for the US, a unique technique we employed involved Native American’s—the so-called Navajo Code Talkers—who used their little-known language to convey important intelligence between various commands. Other tools were used, as well. You’ll be impressed by the techniques described in the book.

One section in the book—the French Resistance—meant a lot to me personally. My Algerian-born, Paris-raised aunt, Gisèle Atlan Rubinstein, was arrested in Paris on January 31, 1944, and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on February 10th (Convoy #68). Though Nazi records showed she died in that camp, Gisèle escaped from Auschwitz during an uprising in October, 1944, joined the French Resistance, and took to her grave the number tattooed on her inner forearm. Her life today is memorialized in a monument at the corner of rue des Trois-Coigneaux and avenue Charles de Gaulle in Paris.

Gisèle isn’t as famous, of course, as Virginia Hall, an American woman who spied for both the British and Americans against the Germans. Hall also lived in Paris when the war broke out. Her story is in the book, as is, among others, the story of Richard Sorge, aka “Ramsay.” Sorge, German, was born to a German father and Russian mother. He eventually left Germany and moved to the Soviet Union. There, the government encouraged him to join the Nazi party. Sorge then went to work for a German newspaper, which sent him to Japan. I won’t spoil the story that unfolds from there, but it’s a doozy! You’ll have to read the book to learn “Ramsay’s” fate.

This book would make the perfect holiday gift for children (and some adults, as well). It certainly held my interest and taught me a lot about the people who played important roles in the Allies’ battle to win World War II. I guarantee you . . . you will not be disappointed.




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